All the Dangerous Things - Stacy Willingham - ★★.½

AUTHOR: Stacy Willingham

NARRATOR: Karissa Vacker

GENRE: Mystery-Thriller.

RATING: 2.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A slow, slow, slow “thriller”. Worth it for the final resolution, but the journey to reach that point was eye-roll-inducing. I’m making it official: I am tired of 1st person unreliable narrators  that ramble too much and trust only themselves.

Story Synopsis:

Isabelle Drake’s toddler son Mason was kidnapped a year ago. She hasn’t slept since. The case is now cold, with no clues and no leads for the police. Even her marriage is over, not being able to stand the strain of a missing child. Isabelle tries to keep the investigation active by speaking about Mason at true crime cons. At one such event, she bumps into a crime podcaster who wants to highlight Mason in his next show. But as they proceed with this, Isabelle starts questioning her own memories of what happened that night.

The story comes to us in the first person perspective of Isabelle from ‘Now’ and ‘Then’ timelines.

Where the book worked for me:

😍 The identity of the kidnapper and the resolution of the mystery were easily the best parts of the book. It is this section that caused me to push up my rating to 2.5. Until then, I was sitting firmly on the 2 star mark.

Where the book left me with mixed feelings:

😐 The author has a tendency to use analogies in her writing, and almost all of these are excellent. It’s after a long time that I noticed such nice descriptive writing in a thriller. Then again, do people want beautiful prose in a thriller? Let me not open that Pandora’s Box.

😐 The mystery/suspense feels very guessable but has enough surprises and twists to keep you on your toes. A couple of the twists are nice but many of them were just silly. Some were farfetched.

😐 In the ‘Then’ timeline, things are pretty interesting and I was quite hooked onto the events that might have affected contemporary Isabelle. But towards the end, there come two “big reveals” that are utterly out of the blue and didn’t make sense at all. These killed the impact of this timeline for me.

Where the book could have worked better for me:

😬 The word ‘thriller’ applies to the book in its loosest possible sense. Most of the book is more of a slow-burn mystery. If you want adrenaline-filled thrills, this is the wrong book.

😬 As this is advertised as a thriller in every blurb and almost every review, I was hoping for something fast and high-octane. But this was too slow and meandering for my mood. Thank God for the audiobook!

😬 I’m beginning to hate the use of first person in this genre. All we get is “I think”, “I wonder”, “I imagine”, “I feel”,… after every few lines. It kills the momentum of the plot. I understand that first person povs will always have some inner monologues, but there should be a limit to them, especially in genres that function on pace.

😬 Isabelle is the typical contemporary thriller protagonist: a woman obsessed with an idea and who assumes herself to be correct while everyone around her has to be wrong. Clichéd to the core! I didn’t understand why she felt that only she could find out what happened to Mason, and yet she was so determined to sabotage her chances of doing so by taking one stupid decision after another. I might have enjoyed this better had I been able to connect with Isabelle.

😬 Why can’t we have one “thriller” where the husband turns out to be a good guy who is equally devastated by his child’s kidnapping without being a gaslighting, cheating dickhead?

😬 As usual, the police didn’t find out anything important. It is our unreliable narrator who manages to resolve the case almost entirely on her own, a whole year after the incident. So basically, nothing much happened for a year, and then every secret started unravelling within a couple of weeks and the mystery is resolved too neatly, tied together with a ribbon on top.

The audiobook experience:

The audiobook, clocking at nearly 10 hours, is narrated by Karissa Vacker. She is pretty good. I loved how she voiced Isabelle distinctly for the Now and Then timeframes. I wasn’t a big fan of her male voices, but overall, she did a nice job.

All in all, except for the ending, this was too slow and too melodramatic and too whiny and too clichéd for me. But as usual, I am the only one whining about it in a melodramatic way. Almost all of my friends LOVED it. So please read their reviews and take a call on the book while I sit here alone on Outlier Island, moping and sulking. Sigh.

My thanks to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for the ALC of “All the Dangerous Things”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.