Book Review: A Flicker in the Dark

Spoilers!

With mystery thriller books involving a classic whodunit, authors tend to throw out multiple suspects, i.e., red herrings, until the big reveal occurs. In her debut book, 2021’s A Flicker in the Dark, Stacy Willingham upends the formula with a devilishly enthralling book about murder and paranoia in the Louisiana bayou (always a decidedly gritty setting for a whodunnit).

Chloe’s father pleaded guilty to the murder of six girls, all around the age of 15, when she herself was only 12 (and her brother, Cooper, was 15). Shortly thereafter, her mother attempted suicide, leaving her disabled in an assisted living facility. Nearing the 20-year anniversary of the crime, Chloe’s life seems on the upswing. She has her own private medical psychologist practice, and she’s on the precipice of marrying Daniel, a man she’s madly in love with. But this upward swing has a problem bubbling under the surface: Chloe is prescribing herself Xanax through Daniel’s name. I don’t know why she doesn’t just do it legally through her own name! There’s no shame in taking Xanax, but in her thinking, there is shame in taking Xanax as the child of a serial killer. Additionally, she repeats at least a few times that she can take care of herself because she’s a psychologist. However, even therapists have therapists! For good reason because we are not actually equipped to help ourselves by ourselves. Nonetheless, this upward swing is upended when a girl goes missing and is found dead in a nearby cemetery, and then another girl goes missing. This time, it’s one of Chloe’s patients. She’s also found dead. On the 20-year anniversary of the killings by her father, she wonders if there’s a copycat killer taunting her, and thrusts herself into the case. The copycat killer idea was pushed on her by the purported New York Times reporter, Aaron.

When I’m reading a whodunit, I’m immediately suspicious of everyone, trying to pinpoint where the author is going to place the “twist” of the killer. So, naturally, I was skeptical of Aaron.

I had three red flags with Aaron:

• Just because he said he’s a New York Times reporter doesn’t mean he actually is, and perhaps Chloe was too ready to believe him, despite her annoyances with him initially (assuming him to be a seedy reporter hellbent on exploiting the 20-year anniversary). The New York Times wouldn’t act that way, though.
• Aaron going to the assisted living facility to visit with her mother without Chloe’s consent or knowledge, at least, is definitely something a real reporter wouldn’t do. He claimed it was to “get her attention.”
• He immediately was willing to sleep with the subject of his article, which, while not unheard of, still raised a red flag with me. (And correspondingly, even though there’s some added context I’ll get into later, that Chloe slept with him is troubling!)

However, Chloe thinks the killer may, in fact, be Daniel, her fiancé.

I already had my red flags going for Daniel, too:

• He travels a lot as a pharmaceutical salesman, which provides ample opportunity to be a serial killer!
• He just “happens” to meet Chloe, a rather notable (in that region) child of a serial killer at the Baton Rouge General Hospital, sparking their relationship.
• Chloe’s never met his family. That’s always a red flag in books like these!
• In one of the retellings of their courtship, Chloe recounts Daniel saying to her, “I had a little sister once.” Notice the past tense?! It made me think he’s the copycat killer, motivated by duplicating the crimes that killed her sister for some sick reason.
• He picked July as their marriage month, knowing that’s the month of the 20-year anniversary. Very questionable to do that, if he’s completely innocent.

Chloe starts to put together some of these red flags, in addition to the facts of finding one of the dead girl’s pieces of jewelry in their closet (her dad took the jewelry of his victims as trophies, something serial killers sometimes do), and smelling perfume on Daniel’s shirt collar. There’s also the sneaky bit of misdirection I caught from Willingham right away. When Chloe and Cooper’s mother appears on the verge of death, Chloe gets her to communicate via Scrabble tiles. The mother taps out the letters D-A before they are interrupted. D-A for Daniel? That’s what Chloe thinks, but since Willingham, and by extension, Chloe, seemed so hot and heavy on Daniel being the killer, my brain went to D-A for “dad.” Meaning, Chloe’s mother was trying to say her husband, and Chloe’s dad, had some clues as to the recent spate of murders. I’ll take the victory lap on that one!

All of which brings me to my rising suspicion of Cooper, Chloe’s brother, who is largely missing-in-action throughout the book, which incidentally, is one of the red flags about him for me.

Here are my additional Cooper red flags:

• He’s the son of a serial killer. So, either he’s copycating his dad’s crimes, or the only reason the dad willingly pleaded guilty to killing six girls is to protect his son who actually did the killings.
• That also makes the dad’s final words, “Be good,” make more sense, i.e., directed to Cooper.
• If the dad was the killer, it seemed odd he would be so outwardly protective (in the privacy of their home, no less) of his daughter when the girls started going missing.
• He has Chloe’s house key, which means he could have planted the necklace on Daniel to make Daniel seem guilty.
• If he was a copycat, he obviously knows intimate details of the crimes.

As it turns out, they’re all guilty to some degree or another. Aaron killed the most recent girls and attempted to kill a third before Chloe intervened at her childhood home, no less. He was shot by Chloe in self-defense before he could explain anything other than that he was made to do it. Made to do it by … Cooper, because Cooper was the original killer, not his father. That means Cooper became a serial killer at age 15 (stretches belief! I can believe psychopathic tendencies are latent by then, but to already have a few killings under your belt? I’m not so sure). And somehow the bodies were never discovered in the backyard (stretches belief!). Why did Cooper go dormant for 20 years? We’re never told. Why did Cooper use Aaron as his vessel to start killing again? We’re never told that, either, but I suspect that could be a control situation and/or Cooper’s way of driving Daniel out of Chloe’s life (because he suspected that Daniel knew). Chloe drugs Cooper to tape him confessing to the crimes. While I’m glad the dad will get out of prison for crimes he didn’t commit, he’s still morally questionable (and probably legally questionable!) for covering up his son’s crimes.

Daniel, for his part, didn’t kill anyone. So, when I said he’s guilty by a varying degree, I mean an extraordinarily different degree. What he’s guilty of is lying to Chloe and withholding pertinent information, like that he suspected Cooper of being the real killer. Or that he was “inspired” by the original killings to use them as a cover to (heroically) save his younger sister from her abusive father and living situation, i.e., Daniel knew all about Chloe before they ever met. I’m still not sure how a 17-year-old was able to get a 13-year-old girl to somewhere safe, but nonetheless, it explains why, for example, Chloe had the wedding ring intended for Sophie. But to be fair, Chloe also lied repeatedly and often to Daniel, even before she suspected him of being a serial killer of young girls. And she cheated on him, but like I said, at least that has the context of her thinking she was in a relationship with a serial killer (but of course, she slept with the real serial killer!).

Overall, Willingham’s book was a fun whodunit, where I was trying to amass my red flag case for various suspects throughout, primarily leaning toward Daniel until Chloe also started leaning too heavily against him, which always makes me concerned I’ve flagged (heh) the wrong suspect. In this case, I had red flags against Aaron and Cooper, too, and they were both guilty, and Daniel had his secrets as well.

Willingham is someone I’d be interested in reading again; she reminds me of Freida McFadden and Jeneva Rose, all authors of xciting, propulsive whodunit reads with a few twists along the way.