Synopsis:
Marin Machado had the perfect life. Married to her college sweetheart, Derek, she is financially comfortable — she owns a chain of upscale hair salons, and Derek runs his own company. They’re active in their community. frequently supporting charitable causes. With their four-ear-old son, Sebastian, they have built a loving, stable family.
Four minutes. That’s all it took to steal Sebastian. A lollipop, a Santa suit, and two hundred forty seconds.
A year later, Marin is a shadow of herself. With no clues to follow, the FBI has declared the case still open, but unsolved. The publicity surrounding Sebastian’s abduction has faded.
Marin and Derek rarely speak. The only thing keeping Marin going is the unlikely chance that one day Sebastian will reappear. Without Derek’s knowledge, she hires a private investigator to pick up where the police left off. But instead of finding Sebastian, the P.I. discovers that Derek is having an affair with a younger woman.
Kenzie Li is an artist and grad student. Instagram famous, she’s up to her eyeballs in debt, in part because she is providing full-time care for her ailing mother. She knows Derek is married. She knows he’s rich. Dating him comes with perks: help with bills, trips that include stays at luxurious hotels, expensive gifts. He’s not her her first rich boyfriend . . . but to her own surprise, she hopes he’ll be her last. She’s falling for him, even though that was never part of the plan.
Discovery of the affair sparks Marin back to life. She’s lost her son. She’s not about to lose her husband, too. Unlike Sebastian’s kidnapper, Kenzie is an enemy with a face — a problem Marin can fix. But as she sets a plan in motion, another revelation surfaces. Derek’s lover might know what happened to their son.
And so might Derek.
Review:
After losing Sebastian, Marin sank into a deep depression and lost the will to live. Fifteen months later, she still thinks about ending her life, especially if she ever learns that Sebastian will never be coming home. Because she knows that it was her fault and she has no one to blame but herself. She was the one who lost sight of her child. Now she is back at work in her high-end salon, and she and Derek are going through the motions of carrying on with their lives, hoping that Sebastian will be found and returned to them. But the silences, the business trips, and the tension have taken a toll on their marriage. Unable to discover any new clues that might lead them to Sebastian’s abductor, the FBI has shelved the case, even though the file will reopen open and they will reactive the investigation should new evidence come to light. Marin attends a support group for parents of missing children, and still sees Dr. Chen, her therapist, with whom she shares secrets she cannot tell Derek about the lengths to which she goes in order to cope with not knowing whether her beloved son is dead or alive.
She is keeping one rather large secret from Derek. She has never told him that she retained a PI to search for Sebastian because hearing from the police that they had done everything they could but come up empty “was nearly as devastating as losing Sebastian in the first place.” Vanessa Castro is a former Seattle police officer who specializes in finding missing children. She is successful because her methods are unconventional, and she looks in places where the police won’t or can’t look. Marin “couldn’t live with the thought that nobody was looking for him. Someone always has be to looking.”
Who would have thought that who you love and who you feel safe with might not be the same person?
But Castro has made an inadvertent discovery Marin wasn’t expecting. So when she tells Marin “it appears your husband is seeing someone,” Marin is shocked to see photos of Derek with a much younger woman. There’s a “spark of familiarity . . . something in the angle of her chin, the shape of her eyes. But then Marin blinks, and the sense of deja vu is gone, and the woman is a stranger. A stranger holding hands with her husband.”
Marin has maintained a close friendship with her college boyfriend, Sal Palermo. He has remained a lifeline for Marin through the problems in her marriage before Sebastian was born and everything else she has gone through over the years. He texts her every single morning, asking “You alive?” if he doesn’t hear from her first. Sal is an ex-convict, casual drug dealer, and runs a local bar that can best be described as “shady.” Sal has never married, but has had a series of short-term relationships. And he claims that he knows people who can “take care of” problems. Marin trusts him implicitly, has confided in him about everything over the years, and agrees to accept his assistance when she learned about Derek’s duplicitous behavior.
Little Secrets succeeds as a direct result of Hillier’s ability to make readers care about her characters, each of whom is seriously flawed and engaging in abhorrent and immoral conduct, but doing so in response to life events that have driven them to do things they would never have otherwise contemplated. Each, in his/her own way, is motivated by self-interest, but also love. Or at least the kind of love he/she is capable of feeling. In Marin’s case, she has sustained the worst loss imaginable. Her four-year-old son was ripped away from her without a trace, and she is full of self-loathing and guilt. She actively ponders ending her own life, opting to live only because of the chance, however remote, that Sebastian will be returned to her. She knows that “hope lasts only so long, can carry you only so far. It’s both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes it’s all you have. It keeps you going when there’s nothing else to hold on to. But hope can also be terrible. It keeps you wanting, waiting, wishing for something that might never happen. It’s like a glass wall between where you and where you want to be. You can see the life you want, but you can’t have it. You’re a fish in a bowl.” She loves Derek and is deeply hurt by the revelation that he has been involved with Kenzie, the attractive young barista, for six months. Derek loves Marin and is mourning the loss of his son, but seeking to escape his own guilt by entering into a destructive affair with Kenzie, who learned long ago that rich men will pay to ensure that their wives don’t find out about their extramarital activities. Her tuition and the costs of caring for her mother, stricken with early-onset Alzheimer’s, are exorbitantly expensive and she has found that she can maintain a certain lifestyle, a modicum of Instagram fame, and accomplish her financial goals by zeroing in on men who are emotionally needy, vulnerable, and financially able to provide for her. She’s surprised by the feelings she is developing for Derek, aware that the odds he will leave Marin are slim. Lastly, Sal has been a loyal friend to Marin since their romance ended more than twenty years ago, always lending a sympathetic ear and support to her as she has struggled to keep her marriage intact and get through another day of grieving for Sebastian. He’s the friend everyone wants in their life: the one who knows you best, including your most humiliating moments, loves you anyway, and will make sure you get home safely when you drink too much. But Sal’s compassion and empathy are not unlimited or entirely altruistic.
Each of Hillier’s complexly-crafted characters is empathetic, particularly Marin, and Hillier challenges readers to contemplate the lengths to which they would go to save their own family. Hillier says she learned, while writing the book,that most kidnapped children are taken by their non-custodial parent. “Stranger abduction is actually a fairly small percentage. It’s alarming and sad.” She found Marin’s pitch-perfect voice by imagining how she would feel if she lost her own child in the same manner. As for Derek’s affair with Kenzie, in Marin’s mind it is Kenzie who is the villain. She rationalizes Derek’s role in the affair because of her own guilt. If Derek can forgive her for losing their child, she can forgive him for getting involved with another woman. But Kenzie’s complicity is, for Marin, unforgivable. “She’s invested nothing, and is trying to take everything. And that cannot stand” in Marin’s value system. Hillier believably portrays Marin’s despair, grief, anger, and need to take control of some aspect of her life, no matter how despicable her contemplated action may be.
And each of Hillier’s characters is harboring secrets that inform their decisions, compel their behavior, and threaten to derail their lives and relationships if revealed. Hillier relates the story at a steady, relentless pace that accelerates as, one by one, those secrets start coming to light and the characters react to what they learn. Always, at the center of the tale is a defenseless, innocent child — the adorable Sebastian who was last seen wearing a reindeer sweater, impatiently imploring his mother to finish her Christmas shopping and take him to the candy store and buy him his favorite variety of lollipop. Marin is haunted by the fact that Sebastian’s kidnapper was wearing a Santa suit. Sebastian loved Santa Claus, but found him intimidating and would have looked to Marin for confirmation that it was all right to go with him . . . unless the person wearing the costume was someone Sebastian knew. Is Sebastian still alive? If so, has he been harmed? Who kidnapped him? Was it someone Sebastian knew, as Marin has always suspected? Is so, why would anyone who knew Sebastian or his parents take him? At least as far as Marin is aware, no ransom demand was ever communicated, so what was the abductor’s motive? Shocking revelations and plot twists compel the story forward to an explosive, but satisfying conclusion.
Hillier says that Little Secrets is the darkest story she has ever written. Indeed, the themes she tackles — obsession, betrayal, greed, revenge, grief — are unsettling and disturbing. But the tale is gut-wrenching, deeply engaging, and thought-provoking, making Little Secrets one of 2020’s most sophisticated and entertaining thrillers.
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