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Heart of Glass: A Small Town Haunted by Its Killer
Seaside, Washington, is the kind of place that used to coast on the memory of a good summer. It had Wonderland, a ramshackle amusement park where teenagers fell in love and the boardwalk smelled of cotton candy and salt, and for decades that was enough. Then, twenty-five years ago, a killer used that same park to steal the town's innocence, and Seaside has been living in the shadow of the Carnival Killer ever since.
Now Wonderland is set to reopen, a last-ditch effort to drag the dying town back to life. Barb and Nicolette were two of the three inseparable girls who met the charming drifter Sam at the park that fateful summer, the summer their best friend Lorelei was murdered, her body found in a flooded cranberry bog not far from where she died. Sam confessed to killing Lorelei and four other young women, and the case was closed; Barb stayed in Seaside to become the town's reporter, while Nicolette moved away to chase fame.
Then the Carnival Killer recants his confession. And the same week Wonderland prepares to throw open its gates, a new body washes ashore. The past Barb and Nicolette have fought so hard to bury is surfacing with it, and the truth about what happened to Lorelei, and what is happening now, begins to claw its way out of the bog, threatening to unravel Seaside itself.
I went into Heart of Glass already a fan of Jennifer Hillier's unflinching, character-driven suspense, and this one did not disappoint. It is a cold case that refuses to stay buried, set against a small coastal town trying to sell its way back to relevance with a grand reopening. Hillier balances a genuinely unsettling present-tense mystery with the slow, aching excavation of a friendship fractured by grief, and the multicast narration turns it into a genuinely immersive listen.
What struck me first is how well Hillier builds the town itself as a presence. Seaside is not just a backdrop; it is a place defined by a single awful summer, and every reopened shop, every newspaper headline, and every nervous glance at the shuttered park carries the weight of that history. Wonderland's grand reopening becomes the perfect engine for the story, a public spectacle that forces everyone involved to smile while the past claws at the edges. Setting the modern mystery against that looming celebration makes the dread feel both communal and personal.
The dual timeline and dual perspective give the audiobook its shape. Barb, anchored to Seaside and to the truth she thinks she knows, and Nicolette, who built an entire public life on leaving that summer behind, make for a tense, wounded pair of narrators. Watching their versions of the same events grate against each other is where the book earns its unease, because each of them is protecting a slightly different story, and neither can admit how much they might be deceiving themselves.
The narration is a standout. With five voices in the ensemble, Brittany Pressley, Chris Brinkley, Eunice Wong, Ferdelle Capistrano, and January LaVoy give every character a distinct emotional register, so the shifting perspectives and interview-style reveals never blur together. The multicultural cast means I always knew exactly whose memory I was being shown, which matters enormously in a story built on conflicting recollections of a single summer.
It is not a comfortable listen, in the best way. Hillier does not flinch from the uglier realities of a community that has spent twenty-five years deciding how much to believe and how much to look away. At times the pacing asks you to sit with grief and suspicion longer than a flashier thriller might, and those slower stretches linger on the wounds the plot is slowly reopening. For me it earned the patience, because the payoff recontextualizes so much of what came before.
If you love a cold case wrapped in small-town secrets, this deserves to be at the top of your list. It sits perfectly alongside The Secrets We Hide for listeners who want a thriller that cares about its characters, while It Could Have Been Her scratches the same itch for psychological suspense with a wound at its center.
Twenty-five years ago, three teenage girls spent one perfect summer at an amusement park with a charming stranger. Days later their best friend was dead, and the man they all met became the Carnival Killer. Now the park is reopening, the killer is recanting his confession, and a new body has washed ashore in a town that thought its nightmare was over. It is a mystery built on buried grief and two women who each remember that summer differently, and every chapter sharpens the blade.
Five narrators bring Seaside and all its secrets to life across nearly thirteen hours of listening, keeping the shifting timelines and conflicting memories crisp and haunting. With a free listening trial, you can start this cold case tonight, and you can cancel in just a few clicks whenever you wish.
Once you claim Heart of Glass through the trial, it stays in your library to keep forever even after you cancel, and you still get access to a vast catalog of other thrillers to explore. So press play, walk back into Wonderland, and see what the cranberry bog has been holding all these years.
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