A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham on January 11, 2022
Genres: Fiction / Thrillers / Crime, Fiction / Thrillers / Psychological, Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense
Pages: 368
Format: eBook
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“It’s the realization of how many hidden bodies could be buried beneath my feet at any point in time, the world above them completely oblivious to their existence.”
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?
This novel missed the thriller mark for me. It was an okay read, completely unmemorable, and missing the heart pounding thriller moments. I’ve read plenty of serial killer stories, but I’m not sure I’ve ever read one from the perspective of the killer’s own daughter. And coming at it from that angle makes this story feel fresh and unusual. Chloe still suffers from the fallout of her childhood, and her narrative envelopes the whole story in her dark and foreboding mood. Clearly, this is the sort of psychological thriller that leans heavily towards the psychological side, whereas I like mine to be more on the thriller side. I always enjoy a more active investigation.
I gave this novel a three star-rating. It was a very slow read for me, with hardly anything happening in the first 250 pages. Instead, we spend a lot of time in Chloe’s head as she ruminates, freaks out, consumes copious quantities of alcohol and prescription drugs, sticks her nose where it doesn’t belong, and in general, just bumbles around being confused and paranoid. To be fair, this is a pretty common trope for the genre, but it just isn’t my favorite as I find it to be pretty dull and a bit tiring.