Nods to classic cinema noir make for an almost perfectly executed debut thriller

IN the last decade, women writers have come to dominate crime fiction, a genre traditionally associated with men.

A report last summer revealed that the popularity of titles like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train had prompted male authors to use gender-obscuring pseudonyms in a bid to appeal to the largely female thriller audience.

Dan Mallory (right), a longtime crime fiction editor, is the latest to disguise his gender, selecting the ambiguous pen-name “AJ Finn”.

And publishers are keen to sell his riveting debut, The Woman in the Window, as this year’s Gone Girl, with the cover bearing a rapturous endorsement from that juggernaut’s author.

Like The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window provides a narrator who believes she has witnessed a crime, but is hazy on the details — she’s an alcoholic and was drunk on wine and high on prescription painkillers at the time.

Here, the woman is Anna Fox, a 38-year-old former child psychologist, who lives alone in a lavishly restored New York townhouse. Rendered agoraphobic by post-traumatic stress disorder following a mysterious tragic incident, she spends her days peering out her windows and drinking merlot by the bottle.

Her husband has left, taking their eightyear-old daughter with him. In the basement, she has a handsome yet suspect lodger who keeps to himself, leaving Anna mostly alone with her wine, her cat and her camera, spying on her new neighbours, the Russells: the intimidating Alistair, tough-talking Jane and their timid teenage son, Ethan.

The novel leans heavily on classic suspense films and there’s great fun to be had identifying each reference, even if it makes the story a touch predictable.

Aside from the central mystery, there’s also the matter of Anna’s unexplained agoraphobia and Mallory’s handling of her interior life ends up being much stronger than the murder plot.

Mallory is clearly wellversed in the classic thriller formula and his plot — filled as it is with clever twists — is almost perfectly executed.

The Woman in the Window makes for truly unputdownable and very enjoyable reading.