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A review by a_mae13
Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hillier
4.0
“In every story, there’s a hero and villain. Sometimes one person can be both.”
I flew through this story so quickly that the details are a bit fuzzy...but I'm going to summarize what I remember 😂 I'll probably have to reread this to actually digest the entire plot but here goes nothing.
Georgina, who goes by Geo, is serving her sentence for murder. 14 years ago, her best friend Angela Wong went missing. Except, she wasn't really missing. Geo and her then boyfriend Calvin, killed Angela 14 years ago and buried her body behind Geo's house. She finally came forward with the murder because other similar cases have popped up, and law enforcement began to connect them all to Calvin. With the remains on her property, Geo was sentenced to five years in prison for accessory to murder.
The lead detective on the case was a friend of Angela and Geo, Kody. He saw how the relationship between Calvin and Geo actually was, volatile and borderline obsessive. Once Kody arrests Geo, he tries to get the whole story out of her, what happened, why Angela, did she know about the other murders, etc. And as Geo recounts the memories of that night and her relationship with Calvin, the two timelines eventually converge into present day, where more murders are hitting the news, the day that Calvin escapes from prison.
From here out will be spoilers so I'll blur everything, but here's the rest (from what I remember) of the story:
The book opens with Geo in prison and it's GRAPHIC. Her bunk mate rapes her as soon as she's assigned to the cell. Geo teams up with a woman (who's name I don't remember) in return for help on the outside. Since Geo is serving less time than her, she needs financial help (I think) for her family. Geo is assigned to work in the hair salon, which is wild to me. She's serving time for accessory to murder and we gave her scissors? Because she gives those scissors to her new bestie and she STABS THE BUNK MATE and kills her. I mean she did rape Geo but WHAT.
Flash back to when she met Calvin, the two were inseparable it seemed. So much so that Geo started to miss cheer practices and that caused a rift with her and Angela. Everyone felt that Geo was spending too much time with Calvin. Which was fair. There's a lot in these flashbacks but what's important is that, the girls went to Calvin's house one night after a party, got very very drunk (and maybe drugged) and Calvin raped Angela and then killed her. Geo helped him dispose of the body by taking it to the woods behind her house to bury her. ALSO at the very end, we learn that Calvin was too squeamish to dismember the body, Geo did that all on her own.
Geo gets out of prison and goes back to her childhood home to live with her dad until she's back on her feet. She was a CEO at this pharmaceutical company and engaged to the owner, but obviously a murder charge put a damper on that one. Geo experiences a lot of disdain from the community because she was involved in a murder. But mainly because all of these new murders are popping up. These cases are different; Calvin was known as the Sweetbay Strangler, he would target single women (who looked an awful lot like Geo) and strangle them. These new cases have a mother and child victimology, and the killer is writing "See Me" on the bodies. And he just so happens to be using the lipstick from one of Geo's beauty lines from her pharmaceutical days.
Everything points to Calvin, but the murders are strange. The mother child duo are all mothers who put their children up for adoption and had had no contact with the child after the fact. WELL we learn that Calvin raped Geo and she got pregnant. She wanted to go through with the pregnancy and put her son up for adoption. Her dad helped her find a loving family for the boy and they never looked back. Geo was initially devastated with her decision but learned to live with it. Her son, fathered by Calvin, is the serial killer. Why? He's trying to get their attention because this "loving family" he was adopted into was abusive, traumatic, and treated him like trash. He blamed Geo for giving him up.
Geo tracks him down in hopes of starting a relationship with him, not knowing that he's the murderer. He traps Geo in her room and tries to rape her, HER SON, and then Calvin shows up conveniently at her window. They have a brief little family reunion after Calvin beats up their son, before knowing it's his son. And during the chaos, Geo reaches for her gun and shoots them both. Then she starts dating Kody and occasionally visits the graves of her son and her late mother. The end.
This was such a wild and twisty story with so many moments that were intense. Hillier threw in every possible trigger and trauma that she could think of. I felt that the end was a bit rushed with the last climatic scene but as I mentioned at the top, I finished this in a day. It was so unbelievably horrible that I needed to know what happened next.
I flew through this story so quickly that the details are a bit fuzzy...but I'm going to summarize what I remember 😂 I'll probably have to reread this to actually digest the entire plot but here goes nothing.
Georgina, who goes by Geo, is serving her sentence for murder. 14 years ago, her best friend Angela Wong went missing. Except, she wasn't really missing. Geo and her then boyfriend Calvin, killed Angela 14 years ago and buried her body behind Geo's house. She finally came forward with the murder because other similar cases have popped up, and law enforcement began to connect them all to Calvin. With the remains on her property, Geo was sentenced to five years in prison for accessory to murder.
The lead detective on the case was a friend of Angela and Geo, Kody. He saw how the relationship between Calvin and Geo actually was, volatile and borderline obsessive. Once Kody arrests Geo, he tries to get the whole story out of her, what happened, why Angela, did she know about the other murders, etc. And as Geo recounts the memories of that night and her relationship with Calvin, the two timelines eventually converge into present day, where more murders are hitting the news, the day that Calvin escapes from prison.
From here out will be spoilers so I'll blur everything, but here's the rest (from what I remember) of the story:
Flash back to when she met Calvin, the two were inseparable it seemed. So much so that Geo started to miss cheer practices and that caused a rift with her and Angela. Everyone felt that Geo was spending too much time with Calvin. Which was fair. There's a lot in these flashbacks but what's important is that, the girls went to Calvin's house one night after a party, got very very drunk (and maybe drugged) and Calvin raped Angela and then killed her. Geo helped him dispose of the body by taking it to the woods behind her house to bury her. ALSO at the very end, we learn that Calvin was too squeamish to dismember the body, Geo did that all on her own.
Geo gets out of prison and goes back to her childhood home to live with her dad until she's back on her feet. She was a CEO at this pharmaceutical company and engaged to the owner, but obviously a murder charge put a damper on that one. Geo experiences a lot of disdain from the community because she was involved in a murder. But mainly because all of these new murders are popping up. These cases are different; Calvin was known as the Sweetbay Strangler, he would target single women (who looked an awful lot like Geo) and strangle them. These new cases have a mother and child victimology, and the killer is writing "See Me" on the bodies. And he just so happens to be using the lipstick from one of Geo's beauty lines from her pharmaceutical days.
Everything points to Calvin, but the murders are strange. The mother child duo are all mothers who put their children up for adoption and had had no contact with the child after the fact. WELL we learn that Calvin raped Geo and she got pregnant. She wanted to go through with the pregnancy and put her son up for adoption. Her dad helped her find a loving family for the boy and they never looked back. Geo was initially devastated with her decision but learned to live with it. Her son, fathered by Calvin, is the serial killer. Why? He's trying to get their attention because this "loving family" he was adopted into was abusive, traumatic, and treated him like trash. He blamed Geo for giving him up.
Geo tracks him down in hopes of starting a relationship with him, not knowing that he's the murderer. He traps Geo in her room and tries to rape her, HER SON, and then Calvin shows up conveniently at her window. They have a brief little family reunion after Calvin beats up their son, before knowing it's his son. And during the chaos, Geo reaches for her gun and shoots them both. Then she starts dating Kody and occasionally visits the graves of her son and her late mother. The end.
This was such a wild and twisty story with so many moments that were intense. Hillier threw in every possible trigger and trauma that she could think of. I felt that the end was a bit rushed with the last climatic scene but as I mentioned at the top, I finished this in a day. It was so unbelievably horrible that I needed to know what happened next.