Stacy Willingham Books in Order

Stacy Willingham wanted to write long before publishing became a job. As a child, she wrote short stories and little screenplays with her older sister, who helped teach her to read and write. The habit stuck.

Scary stories stuck, too. Willingham grew up watching shows such as The Twilight Zone, Columbo, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and she read Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. She has said she is especially interested in the question behind a bad choice: why someone does it, and what they hide from the people closest to them.

At the University of Georgia, Willingham studied magazine journalism and wrote for her high school newspaper before that. Journalism taught her to look past a first answer and listen for the story underneath it, a skill that now shapes the characters in her fiction. She graduated in 2013, after also studying abroad in Italy and London.

After college, she moved to Atlanta and worked at a marketing agency. She wrote copy and worked as a brand strategist, but fiction kept pulling at her during her off-hours. That led her to earn an MFA in writing from the Savannah College of Art and Design while continuing to work full time.

She hadn't found the right publishing path right away. Willingham spent years trying to place an earlier completed novel, then finished A Flicker in the Dark in 2019. She found an agent shortly afterward, revised the manuscript, and sold the book following its 2020 submission to publishers.

Her debut introduced Chloe Davis, a psychologist whose father was imprisoned for murdering teenage girls when Chloe was twelve. The book became a bestseller and has sold more than a million copies in North America. Readers who start there tend to find a tense, personal mystery where family history is never safely in the past.

The later standalones keep changing the situation while returning to the same uncomfortable territory. All the Dangerous Things follows a mother searching for her missing son while lack of sleep and old memories unsettle everything she believes. Only If You're Lucky moves to a South Carolina college campus, where friendship, grief, envy, and a murder pull a group of young women apart. In Forget Me Not, an investigative journalist revisits the disappearance of her sister in a coastal South Carolina town.

Her books often center women carrying private grief, old secrets, or a version of events they can no longer trust. The crime matters, but so do the choices people make when they are ashamed, scared, or unwilling to ask for help.

Willingham lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband, daughter, and dog. Her writing routine is flexible rather than rigid, and walks with her dog can become time to work through a stubborn plot problem or dictate a scene into her phone.

She keeps coming back to the human side of suspense.