Little Secrets

Little Secrets by Jennifer Hillier, 340 pages

It's three days before Christmas, and Marin is trying to finish up some shopping when she lets her attention slip for a second. Just that quickly, her four-year-old son Sebastian is kidnapped, throwing her into the worst situation she's ever been in. Sixteen months later, Sebastian still hasn't been found, and Marin's life is a wreck. She's self-medicating with a bottle of wine every night, attending a support group that really just helps parents of missing kids avoid moving forward, and just found out that her husband is cheating on her with a 24-year-old grad student. It's this last bit that has changed Marin's overriding emotion from depression to rage, and she is suddenly a loose cannon. What she'll do when given access to a criminal "fixer" is anyone's guess.

Hillier really knows how to ratchet up the adrenaline and hit the hard emotional notes in this book. The panic and subsequent depression of a missing child, the anger and desperation of being cheated on, even the young mistress' mix of worries about her finances and manipulations of Marin's husband... everything seems emotionally believable. I don't know what I would do in any of these situations, but I don't doubt the characters' motivations at all. A heck of a thriller.