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A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham

Thriller

A Flicker in the Dark

BOTY FINALIST

Each year thousands of members vote for our Book of the Year award—congrats to A Flicker in the Dark!

Debut

We love supporting debut authors. Congrats, Stacy Willingham, on your first book!

Early Release

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by Stacy Willingham

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Quick take

When a serial killer emerges with an eerily familiar pattern, Chloe Davis wonders if she's really escaped her past.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Psychological

    Psychological

  • Illustrated icon, Movieish

    Movieish

  • Illustrated icon, Murder

    Murder

  • Illustrated icon, Unsettling

    Unsettling

Synopsis

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?

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of A Flicker in the Dark.

A Flicker in the Dark

PROLOGUE

I thought I knew what monsters were.

As a little girl, I used to think of them as mysterious shadows lurking behind my hanging clothes, under my bed, in the woods. They were a presence I could physically feel behind me, moving in closer as I walked home from school in the glare of the setting sun. I didn’t know how to describe the feeling, but I just knew they were there, somehow. My body could sense them, sense danger, the way your skin seems to prickle just before a hand is placed on an unsuspecting shoulder, the moment you realize that unshakable feeling you had was a set of eyes burrowing into the back of your skull, lurking behind the branches of an overgrown shrub.

But then you turn around, and the eyes are gone.

I remember the feeling of uneven ground twisting my skinny ankles as I walked faster and faster down the gravel roadway that led to my house, fumes from the retreating school bus billowing behind me. The shadows in the woods danced as the sun streamed through the tree branches, my own silhouette looming large like an animal prepared to pounce.

I would take deep breaths, count to ten. Close my eyes and squeeze my lids.

And then I would run.

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Why I love it

How does it feel to find out your father is a serial killer? And how do you go on with your life after such an event? Those are the questions at the heart of Stacey Willingham’s thrilling debut, a novel that is as much about family as it is about the monsters that live among us.

The narrator of A Flicker in the Dark is Chloe Davis, who was twelve when her father confessed to murdering six teenage girls in their hometown. Since then Chloe has gone to college, become a child-psychiatrist, and now, at 32, is on the cusp of marrying a dashing man. But the ground is still a little shaky. She is a little too fond of pharmaceutical escape, a little unsure about the people closest to her. So when girls start going missing again, in ways that suggest a copycat killer, Chloe becomes obsessively driven to discover the truth.

What this book gets so well is that the scariest monsters are not monsters all the time. Sometimes they are fathers, or best friends, or siblings, or lovers. Down deep, we want our boogeymen to come from somewhere else. We tell ourselves there are bad people out there, but they are strangers from another tribe, another town, another country. A Flicker in the Dark tells a different story: Don’t trust anyone. This book will keep you guessing right up until the very end, flying through chapters to find out who the monsters are.

Other books by Stacy Willingham

Member ratings (71,317)

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Debut authors
View all
Ink Blood Sister Scribe
Lessons in Chemistry
A Flicker in the Dark
Honey
All We Were Promised
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow
A Thousand Times Before
Ariadne
The Wishing Game
The Collected Regrets of Clover
How to End a Love Story
The Days I Loved You Most
Thistlefoot
The Wives
Adelaide
Here After
Spitting Gold
The Ministry of Time
Did I Ever Tell You?
Middletide
Dearest
The Stone Witch of Florence
Northwoods
This Spells Love
A Short Walk Through a Wide World
The Storm We Made
Neighbors and Other Stories
The Husbands
More
You, Again
The Love Hypothesis
Red, White & Royal Blue
The Other Valley
Shark Heart
Hard by a Great Forest
Maame
The Circus Train
The Mayor of Maxwell Street
The Other Black Girl
Weyward
The Push
Age of Vice
The Lost Apothecary
Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?
One Day in December
Paper Names
We Are the Brennans
Black Cake
The Last Russian Doll
Olga Dies Dreaming
She Started It
Bringing Down the Duke
The Kiss Quotient
Somebody's Daughter
The Hacienda
Beautiful Country
Lunar Love
Kaikeyi
River Sing Me Home
Love & Other Disasters
The Fortunes of Jaded Women
Sign Here
The Stranger Upstairs
Damnation Spring
The Maid
The Verifiers
A Little Hope
In Every Mirror She's Black
Taste Makers
Fiona and Jane
Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?
Camp Zero
The Last Story of Mina Lee
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
My Body
Honey Girl
Vladimir
Big Friendship
Black Buck
White Ivy
Three Women
White Horse
Someday, Maybe
Peach Blossom Spring
The Night Charter
Behold the Dreamers
The Mothers
The Animators
Marlena
Sharp Objects
The Girl Who Smiled Beads
Small Country
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
Golden Child
The Winter Sister
Small Fry
Too Much Is Not Enough
All That You Leave Behind
Doing Justice
Again, But Better
Free Food for Millionaires
Leaving the Witness
On The Clock
All of Us with Wings
Color Me In
Frankly in Love
The Stars and the Blackness Between Them
The Water Dancer
Full Disclosure
When the Stars Lead to You
My Friend Anna
Trick Mirror
The Girl with the Louding Voice
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P
A Burning
The Boy in the Red Dress
Fleishman Is in Trouble
The Beauty in Breaking
The Comeback
The Prophets
Girl A
Arsenic and Adobo
What Comes After
Things We Lost to the Water
The Family
The Keeper of Night
Win Me Something
Four Weekends and a Funeral