Little Secrets

Marin had everything — a thriving business, a devoted husband, a family others envied — until the afternoon her young son vanished in a crowd and never came back. A year into the investigation, with leads exhausted and her marriage quietly dissolving, she discovers that her husband is having an affair. It's the kind of betrayal that would break most people. Instead, it wakes Marin up. She can't find her son, but she can deal with this. Little Secrets is a novel about grief weaponized, about a woman pushed past the threshold of acceptable behavior and the terrifying logic that follows.

Jennifer Hillier writes with a scalpel — clean sentences, precise emotional beats, and a plot that tightens without ever feeling mechanical. What makes this book stick is its unflinching interiority: Marin is not a likable protagonist in the conventional sense, but she is a completely believable one, and Hillier earns every dark turn she takes. The dual timelines and shifting sympathies keep the tension alive from page one, and the ending lands with the particular satisfaction of a story that never cheated to get there.