All the Dangerous Things - Stacy Willingham

If you’re thinking about checking out All the Dangerous Things yourself, don’t worry about spoilers. The first part of my reviews are always spoiler-free so you can see if the book is your cup of tea. After a quick summary and a basic review, I’ll give a spoiler warning and do a deep dive into everything I loved and hated about All the Dangerous Things.

Stacy Willingham is a popular thriller author, with another book named A Flicker in the Dark. According to her website, her books are translated in over 30 languages ,and she graduated with an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design.

All the Danergous Things by Stacy Willingham

Content Warning

I always like to give a quick content warning for any sensitive topics. These are some content warnings for All the Dangerous Things:

Violence.
Intimacy.
Murder.
Kidnapping.
Blood.
Paranoia.
Insomnia.

Quick Synopsis

All the Dangerous Things by Stacey Willingham tells the story of a sleep-deprived mother who’s doing everything she can to figure out who kidnapped her son, including speaking at True Crime conferences and turning her living room into a one-person headquarters.

Many of the important people in her life, including her ex-husband and the local detective assigned to her case, show signs of worry that she may be becoming a bit too unhinged by the situation, urging her to find a way to move on. As Isabelle digs into the past, she discovers unsettling details and begins to question her memory of the night he went missing. We start to wonder if she’s ever going to figure out who took her son from his crib that night, and if she’s going to like the answer she finds.

My Rating

Everybody has to come up with their own system for judging and rating books, and here’s mine:

One star: I couldn’t finish the book. (DNF)
Two stars: I struggled to finish, but I did.
Three stars: This book was okay and worth reading.
Four stars: I liked this book and I would recommend it to a friend.
Five stars: I’d read this book again, and it’s going on my favorites shelf.

By no means do I think this is a perfect rating system, but I had to come up with something that would help me avoid arbitrarily assigning ratings. This provides a solid guideline for rating qualifications.

I gave All the Dangerous Things a three star rating because I enjoyed and thought it was worth reading, but I wouldn’t recommend it to a friend or read it again. If you like thrillers, or you liked this one and you’re looking for similar books, I recommend Where the Truth Lies by Anna Bailey or Not a Happy Family by Shari Lapena.

Summary

We’re now entering the spoiler-y part of this review. If you think All the Dangerous Things sounds like your cup of tea, click away, read it, and come back to see if you agree or disagree with my critique. If you like the sound of the book but you don’t want to read it, don’t worry, I’ll give you the full rundown.

SPOILERS

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SPOILERS -

All the Dangerous Things opens with Isabelle, the main character, readying herself to go on stage and give a talk at a True Crime conference. We find out right away that Isabelle hasn’t truly slept since the night that her son went missing, despite having been a heavy sleeper in the past. In fact, Isabelle was such a heavy sleeper in the past that she would sleepwalk.

As a little girl, she would wake up in the morning to discover that her feet were wet with mud, and she had been outside in the marsh behind her parent’s property. Not only did she used to sleepwalk all the time, but her sister died when she was young, and Isabelle woke up with mud on her neck the next morning. She can’t remember anything that happened that night, and her parents refuse to talk about it.

On her way home from the true crime conference, she finds herself seated next to a popular true crime podcaster, who gives her his card and asks if she might be willing to come on his show sometime. She brushes him off on the plane, asking him not-too-politely to leave her alone.

Once home, however, she attends a candle-lighting for the one-year anniversary of Mason’s kidnapping, and is reminded that her ex-husband and the detective aren’t doing much to try and find her son. Her soon-to-be ex-husband shames her for her talks at the conferences, and informs her that he has started seeing someone else. Isabelle isn’t very surprised by this, as they had started seeing each other when he was still married.

The detective brushes her off when she tries to share information from the true crime convention. Most people assume that she gives her speech about Mason as a way to make money, but she asks the conference organizers for a list of the people who’ve attended the conference as payment so she can scour the list for potential leads.

When it becomes clear that the people at home aren’t going to be much help in getting her son back, she caves and gives the podcaster a call. They begin meeting and preparing material for the podcast, going over the details of the crime and what happened the night that Mason went missing. They review the fact that the baby monitor’s batteries had gone dead, making it the only night that there was no footage of his room, and the podcaster asks to see the footage from previous nights.

The two of them begin reviewing the footage, and when nothing seems amiss, the podcaster calls it a night. But Isabelle keeps watching, and finds, to her horror, that there are many nights that she sleepwalks into the room and stands, staring at her baby. She remembers how she used to sleepwalk as a kid, and what happened to her sister, and starts to get a horrible feeling that she may have done something to her baby.

Isabelle starts to feel more and more unstable, and decides to take a different route during one of her middle-of-the-night walks. During this walk, she comes across an old man sitting on a porch. She’s taken aback by his presence, as she’s never seen him around the neighborhood before, and she realizes that he has a direct view through another yard and into her son’s bedroom window.

The podcaster tells her that he can’t stay in town, and she offers for him to stay at her place with her. The next day, the podcaster says he’s going to talk to the detective and see if he can get any extra information about the case. Soon after he leaves, the detective stops by Isabelle’s house and tells her to stop poking around. Isabelle shares the information about the old man she saw, and the detective insists that he doesn’t exists, that only one person lives in that house. Isabelle begins to wonder if she imagined the whole thing. Then the podcaster calls her and tells her he talked to the detective, who has only just left Isabelle’s house. Isabelle doesn’t understand why the podcaster has lied to her, and is now on edge about his motives.

It seems like everyone believes that Isabelle hurt her son when she goes on another walk and sees the same old man sitting on the porch. She stops to talk to him and he tells her that they’ve been talking for quite some time, back before everything happened when she would sleepwalk, though he didn’t know that. Then he tells her that the last time she was out walking she had Mason with her.

Isabelle is very distraught and confronts the podcaster, telling him she knows that he lied. There’s mounting evidence against Isabelle at this point, including the videos of her sleep walking and the fact that her dog barks at strangers, meaning the person who took Mason must have been someone the dog knew.

Isabelle believes the podcaster thinks she killed her son and she makes him leave. Then, she goes to her soon-to-be ex-husband’s new house, where he’s spending time with his new lover. She gets a moment alone with him and asks if he thinks she hurt Mason. He basically tells her that she needs to move past it and tells her to leave.

So Isabelle goes to her parents’ house, where she finally confronts them about what happened with her sister. Though they’re reluctant to talk at first, she finally discovers that it her mother, who was experiencing horrible mental problems and post-partum depression, was the one who drowned her sister. With her conscious somewhat cleared, Isabelle returned home.

While digging, Isabelle discovers that the podcaster is actually the brother of Ben’s first wife, Allison. She calls him and discovers that not only does he not suspect Isabelle of hurting her son, but he also thinks that Bed killed his sister, and also possibly did something to Mason.

Isabelle decides that she should go to Ben’s new lover and warn her. When Isabelle shows up to talk to her, the woman is rightly shocked and a little worried, but she lets Isabelle in and hears her out. When Isabelle suggests that Ben may have killed his last wife and hurt Mason, Alice insists that Isabelle is crazy and tells her to leave. Isabelle is on her way out the door when she sees pictures of Alice and Ben, and realizes they go back much further than a year.

She confronts Alice, asking how long they’ve been together, and from there, it all unravels. Alice says that Mason was an unhappy baby, and even she could see it. Isabelle realizes that Alice had been in her home when she and Ben were still together, so the dog didn’t bark when Alice used her spare key and snuck into the house, taking her Mason and walking down the street. Then, when the old man saw her in the dark, Alice simply said she was Isabelle.

Isabelle loses it and pushes Alice, who falls and hits her head. Acting quickly, Isabelle stages the scene, leaving behind one of Ben’s rings that she had been keeping. The detective comes to her home the next day to inform her that Ben has been accused of murdering her, and that they may know where Mason is. Alice had taken him and given him to a mother who was sick with grief over losing her own child.

The book ends with Isabelle having Mason back and going to see Ben in prison, who tries to tell her that he didn’t kill Alice. Isabelle says it’s okay, and that she doesn’t blame him. Then she wonders how Alice could have possibly known that the baby monitor was dead that night, and who may have told her about it. This leaves Ben incredulous, and Isabelle returns home to her son.

Deep Dive

Praise

Now that you know everything that happens in All the Dangerous Things, let’s get into the deep dive. I always like to start with what I like first. One thing I admired about this book was it’s ability to mislead. I definitely thought that the twist was going to be that she had been the one to take Mason. I appreciated that it took it in a different direction.

The next thing I liked about this book was the execution of her sleeplessness. I think we’ve all had a week or month where we just didn’t sleep good. When I was in college, I worked as both an overnight CNA and parking attendant. There were definitely times that I thought I saw something, or got more spooked by things than I should have. I think that her sleep deprivation, coupled with the fact that her son is missing, definitely helped to create a jumpy vibe.

Finding out that the podcaster was ex-wife’s brother was also a pleasant surprise, as there’s a part in the book when Isabelle asks him why he does the crime podcast thing, and he responds saying it’s because of his sister’s unsolved murder. I liked how that came back and tied in nicely, taking him from bad guy to good guy right at the end.

When Isabelle first met Ben, he was still with his wife, and the only reason Isabelle and Ben were able to get married was because Allison took her own life. Though Isabelle was guilty about being with him when he was still married, she did it anyway, and at the end of the book, another woman replicates the experience for her. Isabelle discovers what it must have been like for Allison, and I liked that sense of Isabelle going from accomplice to victim at the hands of Ben.

Another thing I found refreshing was the lack of a romantic relationship between podcaster and Isabelle. Given the already inappropriate romantic relationships between Ben and Isabelle and Ben and Alice, it feels like adding Allison’s brother to the mix may have muddied things up. When podcaster came to stay with Isabelle, I felt certain that there was going to be some sort of romantic encounter, and when there wasn’t, I was relieved.

Criticism

The first thing that I’m a bit critical about are the many flashbacks throughout the story. All the Dangerous Things uses these flashbacks to tell the story of what happened to Isabelle when she was a kid, and I felt like there may have been too many of them. Though the potential that she had hurt someone in her sleep before is important for the plot with Mason and Ben, I did feel like a lot of the book was swallowed up by this somewhat boring parallel.

I’m also obviously not a detective or crime scene scientist, but I am a bit skeptical about Isabelle’s framing of Ben for Alice’s murder. Based on the crime shows I’ve seen, and just my general knowledge about DNA and how it works, it seems almost impossible that Isabelle could have been in Alice’s home for that amount of time without dropping a hair, leaving a fingerprint, tracking dirt, or otherwise leaving evidence of her presence. She does say that she wipes the ring off before planting it under the couch, but it just feels weird that there would be no witnesses to her car being outside, or any DNA left by her at the scene.

This book has a lot going on around the idea of trust. We have Allison choosing to trust Ben, and ultimately losing her life to it. We see Isabelle trusting, then distrusting, and trusting again the detective, her ex-husband, podcaster, and even herself. This tangled web of deception, coupled with sleep deprivation, would be enough to lead anyone to murder.

All in all, I thought that All the Dangerous Things was definitely worth reading. Check me out on YouTube or Goodreads for more book content.

Book Review | All the Dangerous Things by Stacey Willingham