REVIEW: "Hide Away" by Jason Pinter

I knew I would marry the man who is now my husband the first time I heard his voice.

He was talking to my friend — his roommate — over the phone. Though I didn’t have the flip-phone pressed up to my ear, I could hear snippets of his voice — as you can do when someone next to you is talking and you’re a nosy bitch. 

And when I heard my now-husband’s voice, even in the filtered, distanced manner, a thought hit me, more powerfully than any thought had hit me before or has hit me since. 

I thought, "That’s the man I'm going to marry."

I, of course, told no one of this ridiculous revelation, primarily because I was pretty certain I was wrong and, also, I didn’t want to sound crazy.

Then, a few weeks later, I met him face to face.

It was late — probably 2 or 3 am — and I was dusted in flour and smelling of chicken-bacon-ranch, as I had just finished a shift at the on-campus late-night pizza place at which I worked.

I walked into their apartment with his roommate and there he was, my husband, sitting on the sofa. 

Drunk as fuck. 

When I met him, I was thrilled that I hadn’t shared my revelation. Because the first thought I had was, “Ain't no way I'm gonna marry that guy.”

Well, 14 years, two children and one Siamese cat named Biscuits later, I know my first instinct was right.

Which is weird because my husband and I are not similar people.

He is almost obsessively tidy while I am decidedly more lax in regards to housekeeping.

He loves the outdoors and hiking while I love cocktails and sofas.

He is stubborn and sure while I am passive and uncertain.

But we work.

And the life we built together, punctuated by our two amazing sons, is beautiful.

And if anything ever happened to him, I have no idea what I would do. 

So feeling for the protagonist in Hide Away by Jason Pinter was easy for me.

Because we meet this protagonist on the worst day of her life: the day she loses her husband.

Following this loss, we immediately fast forward half a decade.

Despite the passage of time, Rachel isn’t healed. 

She’s changed — forever, probably — by this loss.

In the intervening years, she’s done her best to raise her two children as the single mother she never planned to be. When she wasn’t doing that, she was developing herself.

Changing herself from the soft, feminine, passive woman her husband knew to the hard, muscled, selectively aggressive woman she feels she must become in order to prevent another disaster from befalling her family.

Along with changing herself, Rachel relocated her family, leaving behind the ritzy Connecticut suburb in which she previously lived and moving to a far-flung suburb of Chicago.

In moving, she wanted not only a fresh start, but also a new, safe place to raise her children. But her confidence in the town’s safety is tested when Constance Wright, the former mayor, is found dead under a bridge, her body shattered on the hard frozen ice that, in just a few months, would be flowing water that may have cushioned her fall.

Rachel quickly realizes that, though this looks like a suicide, it’s likely anything but. And, newly obsessed with the concept of justice and the very Quantum-Leap-y idea of putting right what once went wrong, she gets involved.

But her involvement isn’t welcome.

The detectives assigned to the case, seasoned and world-worn John Serrano and his partner, acerbic and brutally honest Leslie Tally, certainly don’t want a civilian anywhere near their investigation.

Despite their attempts to steer Rachel back into her lane, she won’t be dissuaded. 

She knows that someone murdered Constance.

She knows that that someone is still out there.

And she knows that, without her help, this case might go cold before the killer is ever found.

She’s so driven to solve the case, in fact, that she never stops to ponder whether finding Constance’s killer is really worth putting her family at risk all over again.

In a nutshell, this book was amazing.

With stunningly real characters and a legitimately original plot, this is inarguably one of the best thrillers I have read in quite a while.

Of particular strength, in my opinion, was the protagonist.

I was — fuck, really, still am — obsessed with her.

She was smart and strong and passionate and real.

And it is probably because she was all of these things that she reminded me intensely of Kristen Lepionka’s Roxane Weary.

In fact the protagonist herself, and the feel of the book in general, were so reminiscent of Lepionka's work that I slid into her instagram DMs to drunkenly suggest this book to her. #OccupationalHazzard

As a frequent reader of domestic thrillers, I found Pinter’s Rachel Marin to be a refreshing change from the commonly weak,frequently unprepared, sometimes even insipid women that too often populate these books.

In that same vein, Hide Away was a bit more of a police procedural than I would tend to prefer; however, the heavily technical sections — which are what usually turn me off about the procedural subgenre as a whole — were short and broken up with pithy humor and barbs thrown by the also-exceedingly-well-developed detectives.

Honestly, the only thing I didn’t absolutely adore about this novel was the title.

It seems weird that I’m commenting on a title again, because I literally just did that. 

But, while the last time I mentioned a title I felt that the title elevated the work, in this case I felt that the title was weak and not fitting for such an otherwise wonderfully developed thriller.

In this case the title was forgettable and really only tangentially related to the plot as a whole.

Really, the only thing I do like about the title is that it created an opportunity for me to work tangentially into a review as that is my third favorite word.  

I just feel like an amazingly satisfying read like this one should have a title that is at least somewhat as effective as the work it is representing.

That said, I will undoubtedly be recommending this hidden gem to fellow readers.

Somehow managing to be terrifying and hilarious and heartwarming all at the same time, Hide Away isn’t one to be missed.

It earns 5 out of 5 cocktails.

I find it extra thrilling when I love a book that isn’t one of the ones everyone is talking about yet. What hidden gem titles have you loved? Tell me in the comments, below, so I can add them to my TBR.

Want to see how many cocktails my next book gets? Subscribe in the sidebar to the right and follow me on Goodreads.

* Drink. Read. Repeat. is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an associate, we may earn commissions, at no cost to you, from qualifying purchases on Amazon.com