A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham

There's nothing I like more than an unreliable narrator, and I thought this was a great one!

One-sentence summary:
At the age of twelve, Chloe watched her father get put away for life for murdering six teenage girls in their small Louisiana town, and when a local teenage girl goes missing twenty years later, she begins to see parallels from her past that she can’t ignore.

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This psychological thriller is an excellent debut! It’s very well-written, and the protagonist - who is an unreliable narrator – is a compelling character.

The narrative alternates between Chloe’s present, as she is retraumatized by the recent disappearance of a teenage girl, and flashbacks from her childhood a couple of decades ago, when she slowly began to realize that her father was a serial killer. Now, in the present, Chloe is an empathetic psychologist, but she has unresolved PTSD from the past. While attempting to soothe that trauma, she’s developed an addiction to anti-anxiety medication that she attempts to keep hidden. This state that she’s in, which may or may not include inappropriate paranoia about her surroundings, causes you – the reader – to doubt her observations and impressions of others.

I was able to accurately guess the outcome early on, as I’ve read so many thrillers, but the writing was strong enough that I did have moments of self-doubt. In fact, what I enjoyed most about this book is that I found myself suspecting every character, including the protagonist; that is something that only an adept writer is able to pull off. And even though I may have guessed some things correctly, I was still surprised when the twists unfolded.

This was an incredibly well-written psychological thriller, and I look forward to reading more from Willingham!

It comes out Jan. 11! 

Thank you St. Martin’s Press and Minotaur Books for the ARC!