In All the Dangerous Things, the mother of a missing child relentlessly searches for answers while secretly fearing that she’s the one who hurt her own baby. Unexpected twists, a well-developed protagonist, and a suspenseful atmosphere make All the Dangerous Things a wholly satisfying novel.

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I’ll begin with an All the Dangerous Things summary.

Isabelle and Ben’s son, Mason, is stolen from his nursery one night as the two of them slept in their nearby room. At the time, Isabelle was a sound sleeper, but since that night a year ago, she has hardly slept, relying on catnaps and moments of temporary unconsciousness to fuel her search for Mason.

There are few clues in the case of Mason’s disappearance, other than an open window and Mason’s stuffed dinosaur found nearby in the mud. The video baby monitor, which would have recorded Mason’s abduction, had dead batteries. The lead detective finds this unlikely and begins to treat Isabelle with suspicion, and he isn’t the only one.

Isabelle, frustrated by the case’s lack of progress, does what she can – sometimes with unfortunate results – to continue making progress on the case. She’s desperate to find out what happened Mason, partly because she’s worried she had a hand in it (we learn through flashbacks that she had a sleepwalking issue as a child). Her keynote speech at a true crime convention sets the ball rolling on finding out what happened to Mason, although she doesn’t know it at the time.

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Following the kidnapping, Isabelle quickly became a shell of her former self. Whereas her former job as a writer energized her, she’s now unemployed. Once, she was attractive enough to draw her husband away from his former wife, but now that husband has left her and is seeing a younger woman – a physical version of how Isabelle used to be. The police are tired of spending time researching her frequent lists of suspects, and at least one of her neighbors thinks she harmed her son. It’s hard for the reader to not think that, too…

That’s all I’ll say about the plot of All the Dangerous Things. I wouldn’t want to give anything away!

The author stated that one of the things she wanted to explore in this book is the concept of “mother’s guilt” – the guilt some women feel after having dark thoughts about their kids, or blaming themselves when something bad happens to their children. Isabelle is the embodiment of motherly guilt, regretting that she periodically resented her colicky baby and, even worse, that she may have let this resentment guide her actions.

Another theme in All the Dangerous Things is that of manipulation, especially of young women. Isabelle’s husband, Ben, is a master manipulator. He married his first wife and then Isabelle when the women were young. Paraphrasing Isabelle’s thoughts, Ben shaped them to be what he wanted them to be, which shrunk them and erased who they really were.

The themes were well crafted, but what I really liked about All the Dangerous Things were the plot twists that I didn’t see coming. I really enjoy surprises that make me go, “Whaaat??”

I recommend All the Dangerous Things to people who like psychological thrillers, especially ones that have them wondering if the person telling the story can be trusted.