276°
Posted 20 hours ago

All the Dangerous Things: The gripping new psychological thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of A Flicker in the Dark

£7.495£14.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Eventually she agrees to be interviewed by true crime podcaster Waylon, and they’re soon working as a team. Much is to be discovered, not just about herself, but others too, and a it’s gripping read just wanting to know where it will all end. Recommended! The writing style was punchy and flowed well. Perfect along with the short chapters for creating the tension and suspense that kept me hooked to the end despite working out the plot too early. Isabelle watches more baby monitor footage (from before the batteries died). She sees herself coming into her son’s room but doesn’t remember doing itthought she’d stopped sleepwalking in college. Isabelle Drake has barely slept in a year. Not since the night her toddler, Mason, disappeared from their home. Her and her husband were asleep in the next room, but they heard nothing, saw nothing.

But it wasn’t the coffee I needed, I know that now. It was the routine, the familiarity. Comfort-in-a-cup, like those dehydrated noodles you splash faucet water onto before popping them into the microwave and calling it a meal. But I don’t care about that anymore: comfort, routine. Comfort is a luxury I can no longer afford, and routine … well. I haven’t had that in a long time, either.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. We meet Isabelle a year after her son Mason was taken from his bed in the middle of the night, and despite the efforts of the local police department together with a well meaning public, no clues have led to them discovering what happened to her little boy. As she shares her story with Waylon and her severe insomnia persists, she’s met with the uncomfortable truth that Mason’s disappearance isn’t the only mystery to unravel. I thought I had the plot figured out several times but I was wrong. You will need to be an amazing detective to figure this one out!! Now things are even worse. It’s been a year since her toddler was taken from his crib in the night, and six months since her husband Ben left her. He thinks she needs to move on, but Isabelle can’t and won’t rest until she finds their son Mason. After she speaks at a true crime con, podcaster Waylon Spencer offers to let her tell her story. After all, there are still some who think SHE’S behind Mason’s disappearance, and a tragic event from her past isn’t helping.

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.We are nothing but what we choose to believe, but it's all a mirage, bending and warping and shimmering in the distance, changing its form at any given second. In this book, Willingham creates a really creepy and unsettling thriller out of the subject of sleepwalking. How is it I never realised how creepy sleepwalking can be until now? Both for the sleepwalker themselves and for those around them.

Isabelle Drake tirelessly pounds the true crime circuit desperate to keep her 18 month old son Mason in the public eye after his kidnapping a year ago. It’s gruelling and punishing in more ways that one as Isabelle has had little more than micro-sleep since Masons disappearance. She drives herself forward stoked up with caffeine in a relentless bid to discover the truth. After one keynote speech she meets podcaster Waylon Spencer on the flight home and he offers his services. One thing is for absolute sure, no parents would want to walk a mile in her shoes. This extremely well written novel examines motherhood and the expectations that accompany it. 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.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. The only sign of an intruder was an open window in Mason's room. With zero other leads, or evidence though, the police had nothing to go on. The case goes cold.

Isabelle (Izzy) Drake's toddler, Mason was snatched from his crib in the middle of the night, the baby monitor ran out of battery and there was no break-in. A year later with no clue to go by, the investigation stalled and it's up to Izzy to keep the case going and maintain public interest. I wouldn't describe this as being fast-paced, it was more of a steady pace with great tension throughout. Each chapter fills in more and more of the puzzle and it was really hard to put it down. 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! Gripping and tense, All the Dangerous Things was hard to put down. Once I started listening to the audiobook, I did not want to put it down, as this one seeped in and piqued my interest. Motherhood, a missing child, insomnia, and an unreliable narrator pulled me in. Isabella keeps joining at TrueCrime conventions as guest speaker to raise awareness and attract attention to the case. Waylon Spencer: a famous podcaster who already solved a cold case about missing child approaches to her: He wants to make interview, teaming up with Isabella to dig out more about Mason’s case!

See a Problem?

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. Her husband has moved out, and moved on-so when Waylon Spencer offers to feature her on his True Crime Podcast, she has nothing left to lose. Isabelle Drake, a lifestyle reporter for The Grit who turned freelancer so that she could marry Grit publisher Ben Drake without raising too many eyebrows, hasn’t slept through the night since her 18-month-old son, Mason, was snatched from his crib as his parents snoozed a few yards away. She’s been so tireless in pursing leads, even breaking the nose of a supermarket cashier she suddenly learned had a record, that Det. Arthur Dozier of the Savannah Police Department has tuned her out and warned her off the case. Exhausted from touring true-crime conventions across the region, publicizing the tale of her lost boy and the breakup of her marriage that followed, Isabelle agrees to tell her story at length to podcaster Waylon Spencer so that he can spread it more widely while she searches for sleep. But his questions are so unsettling that she begins to wonder if she was the one responsible for Mason’s disappearance—and what her role might have been in a family calamity more than 20 years earlier that was likely papered over because her father was a South Carolina congressman from a long line of congressmen. The windup is anything but tidy, for the multiple mysteries end up requiring multiple culprits. No matter: Willingham is so relentless in linking Isabelle’s sleeplessness to her deepening sense of waking nightmare that fans can expect some seriously sleepless nights themselves.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment