Releasing January 10, 2023 from Minotaur Books
All the Dangerous Things started out well for me: I loved the look at why women enjoy true crime, and how this entertainment hurts the victims. Unfortunately, it quickly lost my interest.
The book begins with Isabelle, the protagonist, giving a keynote address at a true crime conference. She’s a mother whose son disappeared, and she’s coming up on the one year anniversary of his disappearance. In the past year, she’s been unable to sleep. A man approaches her on the plane on the way back from the conference asking her to be on his true crime podcast.
After the first few chapters, I found the writing style difficult to connect with: Willingham filled the book with similes that I think were intended to increase dread but instead bogged down the story.
Isabelle was a difficult character. I found her very unlikeable, and not even in an interesting way. Part of the problem, I think, was we never saw any positives — why she loved her son, what she missed about him. Even at the end there was no specific resolution. There are a lot of misdirections that seemed too obvious, and I found I wasn’t fully invested in the story.
It wasn’t a terrible book, just a bit too generic for my tastes. I think that fans of unreliable narrator stories will enjoy it more than I did.
🌟🌟1/2
Thank you to NetGalley and Minotaur Books for my review copy of this book.
Leanne Olson 
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