BooksOnly If You're Lucky
A sharp and twisty exploration of female friendship from the New York Times bestselling author of A Flicker in the Dark and All the Dangerous Things. Lucy Sharpe is larger than life. Magnetic, addictive. Bold and dangerous. Especially for Margot, who meets Lucy at the end of their freshman year at a liberal arts college in South Carolina. Margot is the shy one, the careful one, always the sidekick and never the center of attention. But when Lucy singles her out at the end of the year, a year Margot spent studying and playing it safe, and asks her to room together, something in Margot can't say no—something daring, or starved, or maybe even envious. And so Margot finds herself living in an off-campus house with three other girls, Lucy, the ringleader; Sloane, the sarcastic one; and Nicole, the nice one, the three of them opposites but also deeply intertwined. It's a year that finds Margot finally coming out of the shell she's been in since the end of high school, when her best friend Eliza died three weeks after graduation. Margot and Lucy have become the closest of friends, but by the middle of their sophomore year, one of the fraternity boys from the house next door has been brutally murdered... and Lucy Sharpe is missing without a trace. From the author of A Flicker in the Dark and All the Dangerous Things comes a tantalizing thriller about the nature of friendship and belonging, about loyalty, envy, and betrayal—another gripping novel from an author quickly becoming the gold standard in psychological suspense.
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Crafting intricate psychological suspense set against Southern backdrops, fiction in this genre explores the complex dynamics of memory, loyalty, and personal trauma. Author Stacy Willingham established a major presence in contemporary mystery and crime fiction with her bestselling debut novel, A Flicker in the Dark, which sold over one million copies in North America alone and earned translation into more than thirty languages worldwide.
Her subsequent novels, including All the Dangerous Things, Only If You're Lucky, and Forget Me Not, focus on dark psychological twists, female resilience, and intimate relationship betrayals while drawing heavily on evocative coastal atmospheres.
Willingham grew up in South Carolina with an early interest in storytelling, writing short stories and screenplays before developing a passion for reporting on her high school newspaper. She earned her B.A. in magazine journalism from the University of Georgia and later received an M.F.A. in writing from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Before embarking on a full-time fiction career, she worked for several years as a copywriter and brand strategist for various marketing agencies.
Published in 2022, her debut thriller A Flicker in the Dark earned widespread industry accolades. It won Strand Magazine's Best Debut Award and was named a finalist for the Book of the Month's Book of the Year award, the Goodreads Choice Best Debut award, the Goodreads Choice Best Mystery & Thriller award, and the International Thriller Writers (ITW) Best First Novel award. She currently resides in the Charleston, South Carolina area, writing full-time as a New York Times and USA Today bestselling novelist.
Willingham's narrative style is characterized by high tension, shifting timelines, and unreliable central perspectives that examine moral ambiguity and past secrets. Her stories frequently center on women uncovering hidden truths while confronting deep emotional wounds, missing loved ones, or fragile friendships. Drawing on her personal memories of living in South Carolina and Georgia, she embeds distinct regional details—such as coastal waterways and lowcountry settings—to create immersive, claustrophobic atmospheres that reflect the interior lives of her characters.
