Book Review: A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham

Chloe Davis grew up thinking monsters were fictional. But when she was twelve, teenage girls started going missing—six, not long after one another—vanishing from her small Louisiana hometown. It turned the entire town into a frightened frenzy, curfews and instructions of coming straight home after school, of always staying in sight of your Parents. Only, by the end of that very summer, Chloe’s own father was arrested, dubbed the serial killer, and thrown in prison for life. Chloe’s mother, brother—and herself—left in the remnants of what was before the killings.

Almost twenty years later, Chloe is now a psychologist in her own private practise, now located in Baton Rouge. She’s engaged to an amazing man, Daniel, incredible friends, and has the kind of happiness she thought she’d never get. But sometimes she does struggle, memories from her childhood and the years that followed—the paranoia, the hurt—that is engrained in her veins. Her worries are amplified when a teenage girl goes missing locally, igniting her past with a solid flame. And when another goes missing—this time, one of her teen clients—the summer her father was arrested comes back to haunt her once more. But the more that Chloe tries to solve history repeating itself, battling her own paranoid parallels between the past and present, the more she uncovers that, possibly, the shadowed and killer past she thought she’d outrun never quite went away at all. 

Overall, A Flicker In The Dark was one of those reads that you pick up and have a hard time putting down. I read pages for hours, turning my brain with every revelation. I felt transported to every setting Chloe was in, Stacy’s writing so unparalleled in gripping the reader. I was hugely torn between who I assumed was the murderer, and although I did sort-of guess it correctly before the unveiling, the twists and turns before that penny-drop-moment were magnificent on another level. This was such a piercing story of survival, repentance and the nightmarish reality of monsters being closer to home than once thought. If you’re looking for a thriller to kick off cosy season, this is your perfect choice. I can’t wait to read more from Stacy! Five stars!