From debut author Stacy Willingham comes a masterfully done, lyrical thriller, certain to be the launch of an amazing career. A Flicker in the Dark is eerily compelling to the very last page.
When Chloe Davis was twelve, six teenage girls went missing in her small Louisiana town. By the end of the summer, Chloe’s father had been arrested as a serial killer and promptly put in prison. Chloe and the rest of her family were left to grapple with the truth and try to move forward while dealing with the aftermath.
Now 20 years later, Chloe is a psychologist in private practice in Baton Rouge and getting ready for her wedding. She finally has a fragile grasp on the happiness she’s worked so hard to get. Sometimes, though, she feels as out of control of her own life as the troubled teens who are her patients. And then a local teenage girl goes missing, and then another, and that terrifying summer comes crashing back. Is she paranoid, and seeing parallels that aren’t really there, or for the second time in her life, is she about to unmask a killer?
- Title: A Flicker in the Dark
- Author: Stacy Willingham
- Publisher: Minotaur Books
- Publication Date: January 11th, 2022
- Genre: Adult, Mystery/Thriller
- Targeted Age Range: Adult
- Content Warnings: Murder, death, descriptions of a dead body, anxiety, psychatric hospitals, drugs, alcohol, domestic abuse, kidnapping, blood, hallucinations, prision, police,
- Rating: ★★★★☆
For twenty years, Chloe Davis has tried to distance herself from the darkness of her past. When she was twelve years old, her father was arrested for the murders of 6 girls in their hometown of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Now, thirty-two year old Chloe is a psychologist with her own private practice and about to get married to the man of her dreams. Life seems to be going pretty well for Chloe. That is, until a teenage girl is found dead, and one of her patients goes missing. Even worse, the details sound eerily similar to the terrible murders her father committed all those years ago. But he’s locked away in a high security prison so it can’t be him, which means there’s a copycat on the loose. Unable to escape her past, Chloe once again finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation. Can Chloe piece together the clues and find the murder before it’s too late?
“I was twelve years old when those shadows started to form a shape, a face. Started to become less of an apparition and more concrete. More real. When I began to realize that maybe the monsters lived among us. And there was one monster, in particular, I learned to fear above all the rest.”
A Flicker in the Dark is a gripping and thrilling debut from Stacy Willingham. I had picked this book up on a whim since I was craving a good thriller and I was not disappointed.
If there’s one thing I like in a murder mystery, it’s an unreliable narrator and Chloe absolutely fits the bill. Chloe is someone who, from the outside, looks like she’s got it all together, but in reality, she’s self-medicating with pills and alcohol as a way to try and escape the demons of her past. Reading the story through Chloe’s eyes had me on edge since you never really knew what was happening in reality or what Chloe was imagining. She’s messy and tense and a bit erratic, which made her a very interesting narrator. I’ve read quite a few mystery novels with a self-medicating female narrator – as it tends to be a popular trope in the genre – and I do think that this is one of the better portrayals. While there absolutely were moments where I wanted to shake her and say, “this is not what you should be doing right now!”, with Chloe’s past I definitely understood why she made some of the choices she made.
The stakes were high throughout the novel, especially as we learn more about the copycat’s victims and find out that they’re more connected to Chloe than one would initially expect. Chloe knows that the murders are connected, but no one will listen to her as she has a history of “overreacting” and jumping to conclusions. Chloe decides that if the police aren’t going to listen to her concerns, she’s going to take matters into her own hands. As she continues to look into the victims’ lives and deaths, she finds herself in a much more precarious position with the police, and especially with the lead detective on the case who already has their suspicions about Chloe. I couldn’t help but hope that Chloe could connect the dots so that someone would believe her because I knew in my gut that she was right – these cases were connected and all roads lead back to her.
I loved that the storytelling was done in dual timelines. The flashback scenes to the summer of 1999 really helped the reader understand Chloe’s past and what she was going through that summer. I loved the way those flashbacks unfolded and revealed that it was Chloe herself who turned over the evidence that led to her father’s arrest. The flashback scenes also helped the reader see the similarities between the original murders and copycat murders. I’m a big fan of stories with dual timelines, especially for mysteries and I think that device worked extremely well in this instance.
It’s a well-known fact on the blog that murder mysteries are my favorite stories to read. I love reading anything that’ll keep me on the edge of my seat. Since I read mystery novels more than any other genre, I’ve gotten pretty good at anticipating the turns that a story will take. Right from the beginning, I had my suspicions as to who was behind the copycat murders, I think I had decided on who I thought the killer was about 3 chapters in.
As the clues began piling up I was so sure that I was correct. Then, the last 75 pages or so, some things weren’t lining up and it seemed a little too obvious. It turns out, I was completely wrong…and I loved it! I love when a mystery can really surprise me. It turns out that Chloe’s blind spot ended up being mine as well, which makes sense as we’re reading the story through her eyes. Once the truth was revealed and the pieces fell into place it made so much sense and I ended up being more heartbroken about the truth than I had expected to be. There aren’t many times when I end up being completely wrong about the twist in a mystery novel, but when it does happen I love it.
My one critique would be that sometimes the pacing felt a little off. Some of the events at the beginning happened a little too slowly for my taste, and then some parts of the ending felt a bit rushed. However, neither of those things took me out of the story or took away from my enjoyment of the book. I easily could’ve read this in one sitting had silly things like sleep not gotten in my way!
Willingham’s storytelling is so captivating that it’s hard to believe this is her debut. With a debut as strong as this I absolutely will be checking out whatever it is that she releases next. If you’re looking for a psychological thriller, I would definitely recommend picking up a copy of A Flicker in the Dark.
Links for A Flicker in the Dark: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop | IndieBound
Stacy Willingham worked as a copywriter and brand strategist for various marketing agencies before deciding to write fiction full time. She earned her BA in Magazine Journalism from the University of Georgia and MFA in Writing from the Savannah College of Art & Design.
Her first novel, A Flicker in the Dark, was published on January 11, 2022 by Minotaur Books and February 3, 2022 by HarperCollins UK.
She currently lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband, Britt, and her Labradoodle, Mako.
