A Flicker In The Dark

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.

This was a very engaging, fun mystery that I quite enjoyed. I thought it was pretty clever and had some good twists and turns. I will say that the author laid enough breadcrumbs that I was able to accurately predict where things went in the end, but I still had a lot of fun following along with Chloe as things unraveled.

I read this in a couple of days and really didn’t want to put it down! It cuts back and forth in time, between Chloe’s present and her childhood, and I found both timelines compelling. Sometimes when a story jumps back and forth in time I get impatient and just want to get back to one over the other, but in this book Chloe’s past informed so much of her present day life that I liked reading those scenes, and working up to her father’s arrest.

There’s an adaptation in the works, and I think this could work really well on screen, so I’m looking forward to that in the future. I’ve also already added her 2023 release to my TBR!