Only if You’re Lucky

I admit that in some ways I feel about Stacy Willingham the way fans of a once-obscure-now-mainstream-popular band must feel. Give me some credit! I’ve been a fan since the beginning! But in truth, so many readers were instantly captured by Stacy’s talent the moment she stepped onto the scene with her runaway success A Flicker in the Dark. And over the last three books I’ve loved watching her star rise higher and higher in the thriller world. With the release of Only If You’re Lucky, a novel about the heady feeling of burgeoning female friendship, she is destined to please her most hardcore fans and bring in a legion of new ones.

Only If You’re Lucky follows Margot, a shy freshman at a liberal arts college in South Carolina still reeling from the death of her high school best friend. When Margot meets Lucy, she’s instantly drawn to her. What Willingham does best is to capture perfectly the scary, beautiful, intense feeling that so many women can relate to of falling head over heels in platonic love with a new female friend. But what starts as a promising new relationship and a fresh start for Margot quickly turns dark when a frat boy is murdered and Lucy goes missing, leaving Margot squarely at the center of the fallout…

A singular entry into the dark academia canon, I can’t wait to see readers’ reactions to every last twist!

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.