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We’ve Seen It All Before

Author: Stacy Willingham

Isabelle Drake hasn’t slept in a year. Not since the day her infant son, Mason, was stolen out of his crib. How could she not have heard? Not have checked earlier? Not have known? And what about all those nights she hated motherhood, the stress, the strain, the demand? Is the absence somehow her fault? The police have no leads. Her husband has now moved on to a new relationship; it’s been a year. He wants to move on with his life. Everyone has accepted that Mason is gone. Probably dead. Certainly, never to be found again. Everyone except Isabelle. She’ll do anything to get him back, and this has gotten her deeper and deeper into the true crime community, pleading her case, speaking (she hopes) to the person who took her son to bring him back.

When Isabelle gets tangled with a true crime podcaster, her questions deepen and darken. What if all the whispers are true? What if she did something to her son? There were, after all, no footprints outside the window. No signs of forced entry. This takes Isabelle back in time, to her childhood incidences of sleepwalking, to her sister’s drowning, to a secret long buried. What if she has never been the good guy, the grieving mother? What if she’s the monster?

All The Dangerous Things is your run-of-the-mill thriller, only slowed way, way down. This book is more slow-burn mystery than fast paced thriller, and only towards the very conclusion does the action escalate, the consequences becoming brutal and quick, the cover ups clever and unlikely. But most of the book is spent in Isabelle’s head, laying the foundation of her fears, thinking and worrying in desolate rooms, remembering snippets of childhood. It’s quite frankly tedious and ultimately expected. The bad-mother motif is all the rage in “thrillers” right now. Fiction is all focused on taking the bloom off motherhood and making every mother a secret, wanna-be child killer because of the sleepless nights and demands of an infant. There is nothing new here, nothing complex or especially insightful. It’s just the old cut-and-paste with a sleepwalking theme draped over the usual “behind the smiling faces in suburbia” melodrama.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

And, as usual, the thriller/mystery husband is a genuine unfeeling, womanizing bastard. He is over the loss of his son in ten seconds and ready for a new, young mistress by the next day. It’s enervating. For once, it would be nice to have the non-monster husband, a real human who grieves over his child and isn’t ready to throw the towel in on his marriage after a bad day. Again, nothing new here, just the same old stereotypes.

And what can I say about the podcaster? It’s the same old, same old. A dude with a hidden motive comes into our innocent, worried protagonist’s life, and as she naval gazes he slowly extracts information for his own purposes, causing the protagonist to doubt herself along the way. We’ve seen it all before, and the flashbacks just make it that much slower. This story moves like an anemic sloth swimming through molasses in the middle of a hot jungle day during a sticky pollen storm.

Where it gets better, finally, is in the end, when the slow roll stops and the drama starts. We finally get answers about Mason, and they come hard and fast. Now . . . the childhood mystery does go completely off script, with a left-field revelation that does not work at all. But the Mason stuff . . . it’s good, and the pace finally picks up. It’s not enough to make me give this book an outstanding rating, but it did grip me there towards the end, and I enjoyed some of the twists that left the character empowered and the baddies out of business. Do I recommend All the Dangerous Things? Not really . . . but I didn’t loath it either. It’s just a generic thriller, a good enough story for when your mind is half focused during a lazy vacation or a bout of lying in bed with the flu.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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