Review: The Woman in the Window

The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Honestly this is so ridiculously similar to The Girl on the Train but that doesn't stop it from being one heck of a story.

Anna is confined to her house by agoraphobia, so spends her days drinking, overdosing on meds and spying on her neighbours. Then one night she witnesses something in the new neighbours' house and things will never be the same ...

The 'something' Anna witnesses doesn't happen until a good 150-odd pages in, so it seems slow to take off, but once you get there the book becomes hard to put down. A lot of it is predictable if you're familiar with the thriller genre, but it's still a lot of fun to read. Told by Anna, there's plenty of second guessing - how much is real and how much is a side effect of her drug and alcohol abuse? Can we trust her word?

It does get a little frustrating at times with seemingly incompetent cops unwilling to do their jobs thoroughly - I personally believe even crazy ladies deserve the benefit of the doubt - but so much of this book is driven by 'what if?' that it adds to the story.

Some interesting characters but, again, nothing particularly new. There's the unreliable protagonist, the (good-looking) handyman tenant, the good cop and bad cop, the crazy neighbour whom only the unreliable protagonist realises is crazy, the innocent kid caught in the middle ... although I was a bit confused by the way Ethan was written. He was portrayed as a child - ten, twelve - early teens at most - but we're supposed to believe he's seventeen. I had a hard time buying it.

The pace really picks up in the second half of the novel, and it'll have you wishing you paid more attention to begin with. It's addictive, even if you suspect the outcome, because with an unreliable protagonist, all bets are off. I had a hard time putting it down for that last 200 pages.

The writing is sparse, and you're left to fill in a lot of the blanks yourself. I found the style confusing at times but by the second half of the novel I was too far into the story to care. It's a clever style, in that it uses story progression to describe scenes, but at times there wasn't enough information to properly build the picture, which could be quite frustrating.

Overall, a racing thriller that will likely race right up the charts upon its release early next year. Despite its familiarity, this is a well-written thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the final pages.

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