The Woman in the Window. A.J. Finn. 2018. 448 pages. William Morrow. [Source: Public Library.]
I picked up The Woman in the Window mostly on a whim. My local library has a program titled “My Lucky Day,” which features new and/or trending titles. They’re given placement right in the center of attention — at the checkout desk so you can’t miss them. The catch? You only get them for 2 weeks, no renewals, and a $1 a day fine. It’s a brilliant program, and I’ve experienced some pretty good reads through their selections.
Reading this book will immediately bring to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Rear Window. I suspect the these similarities are, in part, intentional. Throughout the book, I felt like I was reading a book that borrowed slivers from the most successful in the classic suspense genre. And it works in setting a tone in which you know better than to accept everything at face value.
Anna Fox lives a largely solitary life. A psychologist suffering from agoraphobia, she spends much of her time essentially spying on her neighbors in her upscale New York neighborhood. The monotony is broken by the conversations with her husband and daughter, and occasional visits from the tenant who rents her basement, her physical therapist, and later, the teen-aged boy who just moved in across the street. There is little excitement in Anna’s own life; instead, she gets her drama fix from waiting to see the infidelity of her neighbors discovered.
That changes, however, when she sees the murder of a new neighbor. The book then follows as she struggles with how to bring justice and find out the truth while also battling her own demons. The challenge that comes with this is that Anna is hard to trust. I never felt confident about what was actually happening. Was Anna drunk? Was she losing it? Was she making things up where they weren’t there?
The Woman in the Window kept me questioning everything. It was so easy to make snap judgments and assumptions early on, only to have to backtrack them later. The author gives breadcrumbs that matter, and of course more than a few that are misleading. The result is a book that kept me paying such close attention that I was rereading passages making sure I wasn’t losing my mind like the main character was … I think.
This book has a lot of attention, largely due to it already being slated for film adaption. While I recommend it as an interesting read, I do so with caveats. First, it’s a long book, perhaps longer than it needed to be since you don’t really gain anything from it being so long. I also felt the resolution was rushed and not particularly realistic. My suspension of disbelief was certainly put to the test.
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