My Five Word TL:DR Review : A Psychological and Twisted Thriller

All the Dangerous Things is a book that I read quite some time ago and was during a period where, due to personal circumstances my blogging and reviewing took a backseat for a while.  During the past two months I’ve been striving to catch up and in fact this is the last of my outstanding posts.  What I will say, going back to review a book when the feelings and emotions it prompted have had time to cool off is not my favourite way to do this, I like to write the review almost straight on the back of putting the book down, that way everything is fresh and crisp.  With that in mind this is going to be a relatively short review because firstly. I don’t want to get any of the details wrong and secondly, there are some already glowing reviews out there and I don’t want to go over a plot that has already been well discussed  Also, in spite of this being a late posting the overwhelming feeling of ‘this being your worst nightmare if you’re a mother’ is still strong.

So, basically, a year ago Ben and Isabelle’s son, Mason, was taken from his room at night.  The case has never been solved although it remains open and during that time Isabelle has relentlessly pursued every avenue possible to keep the investigation alive and not give up on her search for answers.  Her marriage has broken down.  She isn’t at the top of the police’s ‘most favourite person’ list, she’s virtually an insomniac and has now taken to travelling around the country speaking at true crime conventions and painfully reliving the worst night of her life.  It really is your basic nightmare.

At the same time as getting to know Isabelle in the current timeline we jump back to take a look at her childhood and we also have a second past timeline where we discover how she met her husband.  Now clearly, these timelines are important to the story.  They all feed into the mental instability that we begin to see coming through in Isabelle’s.  Was she a good mother, was she sound asleep when Mason was kidnapped.  Is she reliable as a narrator.  It’s difficult to say and all these little snippets into her previous life, coupled with her current insomnia, bone deep tiredness and mental anguish begin to cast doubts.  Particularly as the police also seem to have taken a dislike to her ‘interference’.

Now, in the current timeline Isabelle meets a young man, Waylon, a true crime podcaster, who is interested in her story and in spite of it perhaps not seeming like the best idea isabelle invites him to stay at her home so that the two of them can review the evidence together. On the face of it, the two are helping each other but there is a level also of mutual mistrust and you can’t help reading into the convenient way that the two of them met. In this way the author does a great job of making you suspect everyone and flip flopping back and forth like a headless chicken.

In some respects the story takes a little while to set up but this didn’t slow me down, I was so keen to get back to the here and now and find out what went on on that dreadful night that I felt almost annoyed at first with the jumps back in time, but slowly and surely the author begins to weave in doubt and red herrings.  Isabelle herself is starting to lift the curtain on things from her past that have long since been buried and in fact this element of the story itself becomes gripping.

My advice, do yourself a favour and have a good night’s sleep before you pick this one up.  You’ll probably want to read into the wee hours and on top of that I think I broke out in sympathetic exhaustion just thinking of everything Isabelle had, and continued, to go through.  Her mental state was so fragile, she was so exhausted and it literally felt like she could crumble at any point.

Overall, this was a gripping read that I would definitely recommend.  it may have a slowish start but to be fair everything in here is relevant to the story so pay close attention.

I receive a copy through Netgalley, courtesy of the publisher, for which my thanks.  The above is my own opinion.

My rating 4.5 of 5 stars.