All This Could Be Yours - Hank Phillippi Ryan - ★

AUTHOR: Hank Phillippi Ryan

GENRE: Mystery-thriller.

PUBLICATION DATE: September 9, 2025

RATING: 1 star.

In a Nutshell: A cat-and-mouse thriller unfurling during an author's promotional book tour. Annoying characters, annoying plot developments, annoying repetition, annoying ending. I came THIS 🤏🏻close to DNFing it! Instead, I powered through it with loads of eyerolling and tsk-tsking. This is an outlier opinion. I'm officially giving up on contemporary thrillers.

Plot Preview:

Tessa Calloway never dreamt that her debut novel would be a bestselling sensation, or that her lead character Annabelle would inspire hundreds of women to stand up for themselves. Tessa is currently on a whirlwind book tour across the country, travelling and visiting local indie bookstores for reader interactions. She has nothing to worry about as her two kids are in safe hands with her husband Henry back home.

Well, she *didn't* have anything to worry about. But now, Henry's behaving suspiciously. Moreover, someone seems to be stalking Tessa on her tour, deliberately sabotaging not just her possessions but also her reputation. Can Tessa sort out the matter while still keeping her book tour and good name intact? With the stakes increasing in every subsequent city, Tessa needs to take a quick decision on how to handle this without allowing the Big Bad Thing from her past to become public.

The story comes to us in Tessa's third-person perspective.

My friend and fellow reviewer Srivalli sometimes uses the abbreviation TSTL in her reviews to describe the (usually female) lead character. I always looked at it with a strange longing, because none of the books I read ever had such ridiculous characters that I could use the same descriptor. My turn has finally arrived! 💪🏻😎

Bookish Yays:

✒ Intriguing title, which is used cleverly in the plot as well.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

📖 The book tours. I liked the genuine glimpse of promotional tours from an author's perspective. The need to keep smiling through stupid questions, the uncomfortable interactions with strangers, the polite way of shutting down invasive personal questions, the lack of privacy… quite true to life. But some of the points were just too obnoxious to accept, even accounting for the reason behind them.

📖 The Annabelle voice. I really loved it, but I think it wasn’t utilised to the fullest. There was some amazing potential there to add to the atmosphere.

Bookish Nays:

🚗 Tessa. TSTL all the way. I can't believe she was forty! Not an ounce of common sense in her! There were so many scenes where I felt like shaking her vigorously to use her head better. Just one example: Imagine having your charged phone in your hand and still not recording a strange conversation or clicking a photo of the suspicious person even when they are unable to stop you from doing so!

🚗 How the heck is Tessa carrying a key card from a previous hotel? Isn't everyone supposed to deposit the same at the reception desk during checkout?

🚗 Tessa's husband Henry. It's a match made in heaven, y'all. Because Henry was the perfect Mr. TSTL. He gets away with a lot of rubbish behaviour. I can't believe he wasn’t confronted over some of his decisions!

🚗 The never-ending and repetitious inner monologues. I don't think I've read so much of nonsensical rambling, and this book isn't even in first person!

🚗 The overthinking (bordering on paranoia) of every single action of Henry and some other characters without a single direct open communication from Tessa to sort out the confusion/doubt.

🚗 The action also gets repetitive after a while. How many times can we read about hotel check-ins and surprise packages and shady messages and unexpected objects and offensive tour questions?

🚗 All this ensured that the pacing felt very slow. That %age indicator was just not ticking upwards fast enough!

🚗 The Big Bad Thing – Ugh! Things might be told to you when you were younger and you might even have believed them, not knowing better. But surely common sense should start kicking in somewhere after the mid-thirties? The Big Bad Thing was so utterly stupid that I can't believe Tessa accepted it without question even in her adulthood. Oh right... TSTL. (As you can see, I'm making the most of the opportunity to use this abbreviation. Who knows when I'll get a chance again?!)

🚗 Tessa is some kind of mommy influencer (I wish the blurb had mentioned this; I hate influencer books!), and we see bits of this in the prologue, with the live reel about quitting her corporate job and reclaiming her “one life”, and even during the main story. She seems to have a huge following, with fans being ready for her updates even in the midmorning. But we never learn how she got into it or what exactly she is an influencer of, or even why she felt the need to make a dramatic public announcement about her resignation. Here’s the biggest loophole: Tessa supposedly never reveals any personal information online because she doesn’t want anyone to stumble upon her past. What person wanting such privacy will choose SM influencing as a viable life choice!?!? 🙄

🚗 All standard thriller annoyances: exaggerations galore, coincidences aplenty, miscommunication profuse, deliberate misguiding in the first-person.

🚗 The ending. I couldn't guess the perpetrator. But there’s a valid reason why I couldn’t guess it, and this writing choice always annoys me the most in suspense stories.

I don’t even pick up thriller novels willingly these days because I am so fed up of the exaggerations and the unrealistic characters. But I had heard good things about this author’s writing, so I decided to give her work a try. Is it just my bad luck that whenever I try a popular author, I end up with a dud?

This gets a no from me, but mine is very much an outlier opinion. All my friends have rated this a minimum of four stars. Do read other reviews for a more rounded opinion from people who actually enjoy contemporary thrillers, and then take a call on this work. If you like your characters to have less than an ounce of common sense, you may safely give this a go.

My thanks to St. Martin's Press and Minotaur Books for providing the DRC of “All This Could Be Yours” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.