REVIEW:

Sometimes when I’m reading a thriller I’ll get a little flicker of how things are going to play out. Then other times, as with A Flicker in the Dark, it’s like someone turned on a megawatt spotlight. So the prevailing question left in my mind after finishing this debut novel is this: Can you still enjoy a mystery that you didn’t find mysterious?

After a bit of a ponder, my answer here is yes. A Flicker in the Dark held my attention, never bored me, and kept me up past my bedtime. That’s all quite remarkable given that there’s hardly anything original about it.

• Self-medicated unreliable narrator

• Serial killer(s) murdering young women

• Civilian main character that inserts herself in a police investigation

• Plenty of controlling, potentially evil men as suspects

It’s possible that my overindulgence in the thriller genre has left me jaded, and those who haven’t read dozens of similar stories this year will find Stacy Willingham’s novel more surprising. Emma Stone must be one of them, since she’s already got an HBO Max limited series adaptation in the works. (I will say that she has to be trying to stretch her range here, because I couldn’t picture her as the main character even knowing her casting ahead of time.)

Speaking of casting, new-to-me narrator Karissa Vacker narrates the audiobook. She’s given the difficult task of performing a book with a first person female lead that dialogues most often with men. Gender voicing can be tricky, and she handles it by using gruff, deeper inflections for the male characters. That’s always a little off-putting to me, but other listeners may not be as bothered. Still, it’s not often I’ll choose to listen to an audiobook over reading a physical book late at night, so kudos to the author and publishers for a captivating experience all around.

Yes, I predicted the who of the whodunnit, but I couldn't get to the end fast enough to see if I was right.

My thanks to Macmillan Audio for the gifted advance listening copy to review via NetGalley. The expected US publication date is January 11, 2022.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

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?

In a debut novel that has already been optioned for a limited series by actress Emma Stone and sold to a dozen countries around the world, Stacy Willingham has created an unforgettable character in a spellbinding thriller that will appeal equally to fans of Gillian Flynn and Karin Slaughter.