This is becoming an annual tradition, January, the month of abandoned New Year's Resolutions, crash diets to lose the weight gained at Christmas, high credit card and heating bills, has, for the last three years become noted for the much more palatable prospect of reading a new Stacy Willingham.
This American author has impressed me with her previous two novels, "A Flicker In The Dark "(2022) and "All The Dangerous Things" (2023) with her sweltery Southern settings, Gothic touches and twisty plots. In some ways this latest feels a departure but also allows her to do what she does best.
I've already spent time on an American campus this month with Kiley Reid's "Come And Get It" and I must admit I started off with the feeling that it was a little too soon to be back amongst dorm rooms, female students friendship dynamics and getting by without seeming to do any studying! Also, I find the whole sororirty/fraternity set-up with pledges and hazing all very distancing (and disturbing) so when elements of these began to creep in Stacy Willingham was really going to have to work hard to win me over.
Margot has turned up at the college that she and her best friend had chosen to attend alone as Eliza had died in suspicious circumstances in the summer before they were due to start. Margot's response is to shut herself away until she meets Lucy who opens a whole new side to Margot and together they plan to spend the summer with two more friends in a house next door to and owned by a boy's fraternity. We're aware from the start that something has gone wrong and that Lucy is missing.
Following a prologue of a significant moment which means little out of context we have a first-person narrative from Margot in "Before" and "After" Lucy's disappearance sections which alternate through the text.
It takes a little while to build and I was missing the author's more intense approach in the previous novels but just after mid-way through the reader begins to realise how tightly plotted this is. I never saw any of the twists coming and that is due to the author's skill in handling these aspects of her plot development. The ability to shift perceptions of events throughout the novel was evident in the last two and it's present here also.
I think where there's a difference is that especially "Flicker" but also "Dangerous Things" felt very visual and could make strong TV/film adaptations. I think here more is contained with the words spoken rather than events (Margot spends a lot of time assessing what was said) which would be more difficult to get across in a visual medium and without this things might fall apart and seem too implausible. It's the author's skills in plotting, character and misdirection rather than the turn of events that impress more.
I personally didn't enjoy the setting as much as her other novels and it feels more like a gear change towards a younger female fiction market but all the skills mentioned above and that Willingham trade-mark drip-feeding of information means this is her third four star work in a row, making her a consistently strong writer of American contemporary crime.
Only If You're Lucky is published on 1st February 2024 in the UK by Harper Collins. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.
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