All the Dangerous Things

It's been a year since protagonist Isabelle Drake has had a full night of sleep. Her insomnia started after the worst night of her life, when, while she slept, someone snatched her 1-year-old son Mason from his crib in their home. The act has crumbled her marriage and has left her singularly focused on trying to find out what happened to her son. To further complicate things, Isabelle has had a history of sleepwalking ever since she was a child, and so the more she investigates, the more she starts to wonder if the prime suspect in Mason's disappearance might actually be her.

It's against that setup that author Willingham spins a web full of possible suspects and believable motives. She counterbalances Isabelle's present day investigation into Mason's disappearance with flashbacks to her childhood, as Isabelle slowly starts to remember details about a tragedy involving her sister. Willingham does a particularly nice job of taking a singular reaction or comment by a secondary character and using it in multiple ways based on Isabelle's current mental state. For example, Isabelle tends to project how she's feeling onto other characters, and Willingham uses a sprinkling of unreliable narrator to push the reader into drawing certain conclusions about other characters based on how Isabelle understands those interactions. It can be annoying when done poorly, but it's done well here, and the reader is left guessing for most of the novel without feeling like they were lied to along the way.

Just as a she did with last year's A Flicker in the Dark, Willingham crafts a twisty story while managing to tie things together in a believable, satisfying way. The story is fast-paced, and while I preferred the present day timeline to the flashbacks, the mystery of what happened to Isabelle's sister adds a secondary layer of whodunit entertainment. While the sleepwalking subplot may seem a little contrived for the story, it factors in (both in present day and in the flashbacks) significantly, so it's less of a gimmick and more of a significant plot point. In some ways, it almost adds an additional character ("Sleepwalking Isabelle" in addition to "Awake Isabelle") who our somewhat unreliable narrator (and, by extension, the reader) has no clear idea what "Sleepwalking Isabelle" is capable of, since "Awake Isabelle" has no memory of those moments.

All-in-all, it's a solid mystery that's perfect for the beach.