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Only if You’re Lucky by Stacy Willingham

Thriller

Only if You’re Lucky

by Stacy Willingham

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Quick take

Crackling with tension, this campus mystery follows the fracturing of four college friends after a murder.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Psychological

    Psychological

  • Illustrated icon, Slow_Build

    Slow build

  • Illustrated icon, Nonlinear_Timeline

    Nonlinear timeline

  • Illustrated icon, Female_Friendship

    Female friendships

Synopsis

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.

Content warning

This book contains mentions of sexual assault.

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Get an early look from the first pages of Only If You’re Lucky.

Only if You’re Lucky

PROLOGUE

One day we were strangers and the next we were friends. That’s usually how it works with girls.

How effortlessly we glide from cold shoulders in public to applying each other’s lipstick in sweaty bar bathrooms, fingertips touching in a swarm of warm bodies. From spreading hot-breathed rumors behind cupped hands to tossing compliments across the room like darts, aiming for a bull’s-eye, but really just hoping for something to stick. I remember thinking she chose me, specifically, for some reason I’d never understand. Like she spotted me from across the hall, eyes on the carpet and shoulders hunched high as I tried to hide my underwear at the bottom of the laundry basket—flowers and stars and little pink pinstripes, embarrassingly high school—and decided: I was it, it was me. Her best friend.

And from that moment on, I was.

“Spin it,” Lucy says, and I feel myself blink. My eyelids are heavy, the room twirling gently like our old dorm washing machines, slow and clunky and always broken. There’s a permanent cloud of smoke in the house—cigarette, candle, incense, weed—caked into the blankets, the couch cushions. Like if you slapped them, they’d cough.

I can still picture all my mom’s country clubbers tucking my hair behind my ear, fingers lingering against my cheek like I was their own personal porcelain doll. Thinking me delicate, breakable, as I loaded boxes into the trunk while they gushed about their own time at school with distant smiles and tears in their eyes.

How sure they were that I would finally find my people, my girls.

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Why I love it

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!

Other books by Stacy Willingham

Member ratings (6,948)

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All the Dangerous Things
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The Golden Couple
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The Wife Between Us
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None of This Is True
The Silent Patient
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The Hunting Wives
Just Another Missing Person
First Born
The Lies I Tell
Breathless
Thriller
View all
The Boyfriend
The Last One at the Wedding
Sleep Tight
First Lie Wins
House of Glass
Middle of the Night
Listen for the Lie
A Talent for Murder
Beautiful Ugly
Someone in the Attic
One Perfect Couple
Like Mother, Like Daughter
Kill for Me, Kill for You
Bad Tourists
Murder Road
Daughter of Mine
The Fury
The Other Mothers
When I’m Dead
The Soulmate
What Lies in the Woods
She Started It
The Only One Left
Dark Corners
Blacktop Wasteland
All the Dangerous Things
The Only Survivors
The Broken Girls
The Family Game
The Push
We Were Never Here
Things We Do in the Dark
The Golden Couple
The Stranger Upstairs
Gone Tonight
Too Good to Be True
The Last Word
You Are Not Alone
Rock Paper Scissors
Not a Happy Family
A Flicker in the Dark
Reckless Girls
The House Across the Lake
The Last Thing He Told Me
The Maidens
Everything We Didn't Say
The Paris Apartment
You're Invited
The Last Party
Dark Places
Pieces of Her
The Wife Between Us
Sharp Objects
None of This Is True
The Silent Patient
The Other Woman
Necessary People
The Family Upstairs
The Night Swim
Girl A
The Hunting Wives
Just Another Missing Person
First Born
The Lies I Tell
Breathless