All the Dangerous Things - Stacy Willingham

 

This mystery follows Isabelle 1 year after her son was abducted from his crib in the middle of the night.  His case quickly went cold, but Isabelle has been spending her time investigating on her own.  Time that she has in abundance due to her insomnia ever since that night.  After yet another appearance at a true-crime convention, she agrees to be interviewed on a true-crime podcast. Isabelle has been sharing her story for a year, but as these interview questions start to expand from her son's case to her personal life, she gets nervous.  As more details come to light, Isabelle starts to doubt her own recollection of that night as well as some uncomfortable memories from her own childhood. As much as the truth may hurt, she's determined to follow the trail to solve her son's case.

I absolutely love the characters in this book - from Isabelle to all of the secondary characters.  Willingham does such a great job of describing these characters in such a way that I immediately got a good sense of them and was able to keep everyone straight.  Since the reader is coming into this story a year after the main event (the abduction), we're sort of playing catch up for the first bit of the book.  For example, we're being introduced to the detective on the case, but he is someone Isabelle has had a lot of contact with over the past year so she and him have an established relationship.  Being able to be plopped into the middle of those types of dynamics without needing a whole ton of backstory info-dumped onto the reader is fantastic.  I love the way Willingham writes these characters that we get an immediate sense of who they are while still moving the plot forward.  There isn't any clunky slow down of pacing for us to get a paragraph of description or backstory.  

I adore unreliable narrators in my mystery/thriller books but often that is a spoiler to mention because we don't find out their unreliable until the midpoint or end reveal.  In this case, we're told right in the description that Isabelle's insomnia is making her doubt her own recollection of the night her son was taken. I think the insomnia is a really great way to handle this type of unreliable narrator trope without it veering into potentially harmful stereotypes that we see somewhat often.  For example - a character has DID (Dissociative identity disorder) but doesn't know it and one of their personalities is violent. I think Willingham set this part of Isabelle's personality and past history up really well and I found myself questioning Isabelle before she starts questioning herself. 

The dual timeline aspect of this read was also really well done.  We're mainly following current-day Isabelle but we are also following the timeline of her and her sister when they are children.  At first, it isn't clear why we're being shown these past scenes since they seem pretty mundane.  However, they payoff really well at the end.  In this case, the dual timeline acts more as a way to show Isabelle's character growth throughout the story and is less directly related to the core mystery of her son's disappearance. It felt like the book was a 70/30 split between current day and the past, which I think is a good ratio to be at.  These past scenes were little moments of reprieve from the more emotionally heavy current timeline of the abduction.

My one complaint from this story was that there were too many moments where tense moments were killed before they had a chance to really make an impact.  The specifics of these would be spoilers, but the general trend happened a few times in the story.  It felt like Willingham spent so long and such care building up these situations and characters in a certain way that when the reveal came that all might not be as it seems, I was immediately intrigued.  I could envision how these reveals would have ripple effects throughout the entire plot.  However, it then seemed like only pages later these reveals would be sort of neutralized by a second reveal that while it didn't completely undo the information we learned, it certainly lessened the impact.  This could come down to a personal preference, but having this quick negating of tension really made the second half of the read feel a bit deflated.  I love mystery/thrillers that have really high tension and the initial reveals were spectacular.  I think if we got to sit in those high tension implications for longer before getting the resolution, it would have made for a more impactful read. 

In line with my previous point, the ending felt a little rushed.  We get a reveal of the solution to the mystery, then on-page conflict, then on-page resolution all within a handful of pages.  The reveal, itself, was fantastic - I loved the solution to this mystery and how it tied in a lot of ongoing threads in the story.  We do still get a satisfying ending and answers to all the questions, but I wanted to sit in that reveal and resolution for a little longer than we did. It felt like as soon as we got the big reveal, I had just enough time to go "oh, shit, that means...." and then we had a flash forward and some pretty quick wrap up explanation of the closing events of the book.

Overall, this was a really great, tense read. I loved the characters and the character choices that Willingham made.  I had some issues with the pacing for the more tense moments and would have liked them to be more drawn out, but the actual substance of those moments and reveals were fantastic.

TW/CW: death of a child, child abduction, post-partum psychosis, pregnancy, motherhood, infidelity, suicide, drug abuse, overdose

Thanks to NetGalley and St Martin's Press for the ARC

Expected publication date is January 10, 2023