Book Review: Heart Of Glass by Jennifer Hillier

Solid Complex Thriller. As someone whose wife at least at one point watched a fair amount of reality TV, I've been aware of the "celebrities" in that realm and the culture around them far more than I ever wanted to be, and Hillier here takes that world and spins a small town murder mystery within it that someone also manages to hit the current podcast and serial killer crazes... and somehow makes this wild mish mash work rather well.

If you're a reader that can't handle a plot thicker than a baby's first strand of hair... the first paragraph of this review alone should tell you that this likely isn't your kind of book.

But if you enjoy complex, layered tales that manage to pull everything together and still execute some wild and unexpected turns... you're going to love this book.

If you need everything explained to you in giant letters in the sky visible even in broad daylight... again, not the tale for you.

But if you enjoy subtlety, nuance, questions, and space to envision things yourself... this is going to be a book you're going to love.

Even as this book "officially" lists as around 350 ish pages, know that it is a very *dense* 350 ish pages. Full on novel and you're going to be compelled to keep reading, yet also as dense novel writing (ie, still very readable to most readers, just a *lot* of words here) as some of the driest academic prose out there. Some 350 page novels read so fast you'll swear they are half as long as they are. This book, while truly compelling and truly telling an excellent story overall, has the opposite "problem" - in many ways it feels as though it is twice as long as it actually is. So know this up front, and make your own call as to whether you want to commit to such an undertaking.

But if you do join me in reading this - and as I write this review a month after release, apparently nearly 20K of you have already, based on ratings on Goodreads (along with another 4300 reviews there) - I do hope you'll take a few minutes to leave your own review wherever you found this one. Maybe I'm wrong and this book has flaws I didn't see. Maybe I'm write and this really is a solid and complex thriller. Either way, I want to see what you think too.

Very much recommended.

This review of Heart Of Glass by Jennifer Hillier was originally written on September 25, 2026.