A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham Genres: Adult, Fiction, Mystery Thriller, Suspense, Thriller
Published by St. Martin's Publishing Group on January 11, 2022
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 368
A New York Times Bestseller
“A smart, edge-of-your-seat story with plot twists you’ll never see coming. Stacy Willingham’s debut will keep you turning pages long past your bedtime.” —Karin Slaughter
When Chloe Davis was twelve, six teenage girls went missing in her small Louisiana town. By the end of the summer, her own father had confessed to the crimes and was put away for life, leaving Chloe and the rest of her family to grapple with the truth and try to move forward while dealing with the aftermath.
Now twenty years later, Chloe is a psychologist in Baton Rouge and getting ready for her wedding. While she finally has a fragile grasp on the happiness she’s worked so hard to achieve, she sometimes feels as out of control of her own life as the troubled teens who are her patients. So when a local teenage girl goes missing, and then another, that terrifying summer comes crashing back. Is she paranoid, seeing parallels from her past that aren't actually there, or for the second time in her life, is Chloe about to unmask a killer?
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.
Not sure if it’s because I’ve watched endless true crime documentaries, procedural dramas like Criminal Minds and Mindhunter, or I just have high standards for the murder mystery genre, but A Flicker in the Dark did not catch or hold my attention. I felt like I was coasting while reading the first 1/3 of the book and the overall reading experience went downhill the farther I progressed through the story.
Most of my negative impression can be chalked up to Chloe Davis’s personality and trauma attributed to her upbringing and exposure to the media/local community associated with her Dad’s arrest. I liked the concept of her backstory and how it affected her mindset, career choices, and paranoia, however the execution felt clunky and off-putting. I hate to stereotype novels into specific demographics, but the Chloe’s monologue skewed so heavily toward a female audience I felt like I was being beaten over the head repeatedly for 100 pages about how dangerous and unfair life can be for an independent woman.
Her character’s personality and background as a psychologist with a phd also constantly conflicted with the choices she makes and thoughts she has. The book makes an attempt to highlight anxiety and substance abuse but tell me how many phd holders with backgrounds in science and prescription drugs accidentally send themselves into psychosis by mixing the two? Her character also claims that she is guarded and refuses to let anyone get close yet does the exact opposite when the journalist Aaron shows up as a complete stranger and spends 5 minutes empathizing with her right after she goes through a 180 adamant about ripping him to shreds. She also constantly ping pongs between people she trusts and doesn’t affected by a single new thought process with not a shred of real evidence (always circumstantial at best, sometimes not evidence at all). You can chock that up to an effective use of the unreliable narrator tactic or haphazard character motivations, I’m going with the latter. As the plot moved towards the investigation of the present disappearances and the reveal of the killer, I was constantly aghast not due plot twists thrown my way but due to how incredibly idiotic Chloe Davis is and how she somehow manages to make the worst possible choice repeatedly; and I’m supposed to empathize with her paranoia or delusion? View Spoiler »
While I greatly disliked reading about Chloe Davis’s daily disasters, the rest of the reading experience was bland and slow for me. The synopsis sounded exciting on paper but the execution felt very run of the mill and typical for the genre. I normally am not averse to books with simplistic writing styles, but my detachment to the story directed my attention instead to the prose and writing which I found to be weak. So much of the novel is “I did this, I did that” repeatedly with little variation in sentence structure or setup. There’s so much opportunity with 1st person narratives to delve into a characters psyche (particularly with a character exposed to trauma like Chloe) but Willingham doesn’t utilize it at all. View Spoiler »
There’s a lot to be said about the investigation elements here and I’ll just highlight a few as a sample of their questionable quality. The coroner finds a body and decides to test hair follicles for drug residues as one of the first steps in their autopsy yet doesn’t mention or look into the time of death? One of the victims has drugs in their system but upon reveal of the killer, there’s no logical time or place where the drugs could’ve been administered unless they were stabbed by a syringe that would’ve been noted in the autopsy or they drugged her after she was kidnapped for what reason exactly? Teenage girls go missing and the police investigators don’t notice that they’re missing jewelry or accessories, what are the odds that every single girl gone missing has zero fashion accessories in high school. The theory of a copycat killer comes up and the first logical thought is that the imitator is seeking revenge on Chloe (not being enamored with the killer, shock value for personal or political gain, or any of the more standard profiling motivations)? The crime aspects of this book hold up even worse under analysis than Chloe’s characterization.
Objectively if I were to score this novel based on the concept and plot, this should be in the 3-star range or higher. However the fact that I instantly guessed the killer, their motive and the sequence of disappearances 30 pages into the novel perhaps dulls the supposed shock factor and plot twists other readers appreciated. There are some redeeming factors that make this book quite accessible and readable for people who want to turn off their brain for the experience, I understand why it’s popular for casual readers. However at the end of the day I’m rating this based on my experience reading this book and my experience was dreadful. View Spoiler »