“The Appeal” by Janice Hallett is a mystery in epistolary format. I wasn’t sure that this book, written with no narrative — just emails, text messages, transcripts of phone messages and police interviews, would be engaging. My fear that I wouldn’t connect with the writing and the story were completely unfounded. Within the first few pages, I was fascinated by the characters, the setting, and the mystery. In fact, while we often have novels with unreliable narrators or characters who are not as they first appear, in this mystery we don’t have anyone’s narration to rely on. We must rely on the words of the characters themselves as they reveal who they are and what they think of other characters. While we know up front that this is a murder mystery, the actual murder doesn’t occur until almost 3/4 of the way into the book; but there are other questions—other mysteries—that appear almost from the very beginning.

All thrillers include twists and deception. But in “A Flicker in the Dark,” Stacy Willingham proves that she is a master at creating a narrative that deceives us again and again, and as we keep reading with our suspicions firmly planted on one character and then another, she shocks us with a villain that we truly didn’t see coming. At least I didn’t. I reread sections to see artfully placed hints, so subtle and skillfully woven into the narrative that only the finest detective might have noticed them for what they were — signs that we were looking the wrong way.