Book Review: A Flicker in the Dark
A FLICKER IN THE DARK by Stacy Willingham is a captivating story with a narrator who’d be crying and popping pills at your next dinner party.
My book club reviewed this novel in one of our liveliest discussions yet. We all were taken with the complexity and tangled relationships, but other elements had us shaking our heads.
Narrator Chloe Davis is a psychologist in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who is addicted to opioids, lives with her (mostly) perfect fiancé, and is emotionally battered by a horrible family legacy. She thinks about it constantly when she isn’t having second thoughts about her fiancée or deciding when to take the next pill.
Her father, now serving life in prison, was a serial killer of teen girls. Supposedly dumped in a bayou, their bodies were never found. He was arrested when Chloe was 12 years old, after she found a box containing jewelry from each girl in the back of her parents’ bedroom closet.
After the father’s trial, Chloe’s mother tried to kill herself and ended up only starving her brain of oxygen. She is now in a home, in a semi-vegetative state.
Chloe’s last family member is her older brother. He endured the family’s trauma with her and helped her move on. Yet her brother does not like Daniel, her fiancée. It’s clear that he would like them to break up. But Daniel, a traveling pharmaceutical salesman, is handsome and attentive. Plus he’s useful. Chloe fills prescriptions in his name, as well as those of her patients, to maintain her pill-popping habit.
Chloe has a private practice but doesn’t come across as someone at the top of her field. She has too many personal hang-ups, is relentlessly self-absorbed, and wants control over everything in her orbit. Still, we’re rooting for her. We want Chloe to shake out of it, make a good life for herself, truly care about someone other than herself.
Trouble starts when teen girls go missing in the same way as the girls from her past. The book is very well constructed, using flashbacks to the young Chloe recounting her father’s crimes to pull us along the current timeline. Jewelry is again taken as souvenirs.
Clearly, a killer is copying her father. Even worse, Chloe has a link to each modern victim.
The ins and outs of the plot are terrific. Hidden clues abound. Everyone has a secret, both past and present. I guessed one aspect of the twisted conclusion, but others were satisfying surprises.
As much as I admired the construction and sequence of events laid out in the book, the relentless self absorption was exhausting. The narrator’s inner voice was a constant — and I do mean constant — wearying refrain of victimhood, self-doubt, and generalized angst. I wanted to shake her, tell her to do something decent for someone else for a change. (Why I’m not a life coach, apparently.) She’s far too caught up in herself.
Two thumbs up for the concept and construction. I’ll let you decide about the rest.
Carmen Amato is the author of the Detective Emilia Cruz police series set in Acapulco, the Galliano Club historical thrillers, and standalone novels of suspense.
A 30-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, her personal experiences are occasionally disguised as fiction.
Carmen guides you through must-read mystery and deception every other Sunday when you get her Mystery Ahead newsletter. Get it at https://carmenamato.net/mystery-ahead
