Books like “A Flicker in the Dark”

What to read after “A Flicker in the Dark” by Stacy Willingham: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
Then She Was Gone
Lisa Jewell · 2017
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
Ten years after her teenage daughter disappeared, a mother learns what happened and tries to rebuild her life. Meeting a new partner and his young daughter, she is unsettled by small resemblances to her lost child, which reopen the case.
2
The Woman in the Window
A. J. Finn · 2018
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
Child psychologist Anna Fox lives alone, unable to leave her home, and spends her days watching her neighbours through a camera. When she sees something in the house across the street, no one believes her, and she is left to work out whether the danger is real or in her mind.
3
Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn · 2012
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy Dunne disappears from a rented house and her husband Nick becomes the prime suspect. Two narrators tell very different versions of the same marriage.
4
Dark Places
Gillian Flynn · 2009
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
Years after her mother and sisters were killed and her teenage brother was convicted, Libby Day is approached by a group of true-crime enthusiasts who believe he is innocent. Short of money, she agrees to ask questions, and the answers force her to revisit what she remembers of that night.
5
The Kind Worth Killing
Peter Swanson · 2015
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
On a night flight from London to Boston, Ted tells a stranger that he wishes his cheating wife were dead. Lily calmly offers to help him plan it. As their murder scheme takes shape in Boston, each of the narrators hides a past the others know nothing about.
6
Black-Eyed Susans
Julia Heaberlin · 2015
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
As a teenager, Tessa was the only victim to survive the killer who buried girls in a Texas field of wildflowers, and her testimony sent a man to death row. Nearly twenty years later, fresh flowers appear near her home, and lawyers ask her to recover the memories she lost.
7
Local Woman Missing
Mary Kubica · 2021
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
In a quiet suburb, a young mother vanishes while out running, and weeks later another woman and her six-year-old daughter disappear nearby. Eleven years on, the daughter suddenly returns, and what she brings back unsettles everyone who stayed behind.
8
The Housemaid
Freida McFadden · 2022
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
A woman with no money and a criminal record takes a live-in job cleaning for a wealthy family. The wife is cruel, the husband is kind, and a locked door upstairs keeps drawing her attention as the household's rules grow stranger.
9
In the Woods
Tana French · 2007
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
When a girl is found dead in a wood outside Dublin, detectives Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox take the case. For Rob the woods hold an old horror: as a child he was found there after two friends vanished, and he has never told anyone the full truth.
10
Sometimes I Lie
Alice Feeney · 2017
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
Amber Reynolds is in a coma, though she can hear the people around her and cannot move or speak. In her mind she sifts through the days before the accident and the diary entries from years earlier that do not quite match the life she thought she had.
11
Shutter Island
Dennis Lehane · 2003
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
In 1954 two US marshals travel to a hospital for the criminally insane on an island off Massachusetts to find a patient who has disappeared. As a storm cuts the island off, one of them begins to suspect the investigation is not what he was told.
12
The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins · 2015
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller”
Rachel rides the same commuter train every day and invents stories about a couple she sees from the window, until she learns the woman has vanished. Her memory of the night in question is full of gaps, and she cannot tell how much of what she believes is real.