A Flicker in the Dark – Review

Hi everyone! I’m back again today with another ARC review, this time for the highly anticipated thriller A Flicker in the Dark! This book has already been getting a ton of hype, and it’s also already been optioned for a limited series.

A Flicker in the Dark
by Stacy Willingham
Series: Standalone
Release date: January 11th 2021

Genre: Adult, Thriller
Rating: ★★★★☆

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?

I truly found it difficult to put this book down, and ended up finishing it in less than 24 hours! This was an incredible debut, and I can see why it’s already been optioned for a limited series because I think it will work perfectly as a tv show!

We follow Chloe both in the present and in the past when her father was convicted as a serial killer. In present day, Chloe is a psychologist and has finally found someone she trusts enough to love and become engaged to, even though her brother does not like him. Chloe doesn’t talk to her father at all, and rarely sees her mother who is in a nursing home. She’s very isolated in her personal life which is understandable after everything she went through as a child and it really helps add to the tension in the book, because there are so few people in her life already and she isn’t sure which of them, if any she can trust.

I typically can have some issues with unreliable narrators, but Chloe was one of the more believable unreliable narrators that I’ve read, if that makes sense. I could see exactly what she was thinking and why, and it made sense to me what her thought process was instead of me getting irritated that her theories seemed so off base. It’s so easy to get invested in Chloe and you do feel bad for her after everything she went through and it makes it easy to understand why she still has trouble trusting others.

There were so many twists and turns through this book that I wasn’t expecting, which I obviously won’t go into because I don’t want to spoil anything! The writing was good, it didn’t pull me out of the story and it was super easy to just fly through this book.

This is definitely worth the read, and you should check it out after it releases on January 11th!