Book of the week
The Woman in the Window by AJ Finn (Harper Collins) $35
First novels don’t come much better than this. Published all over the world, film rights sold and lauded in the highest terms by other crime writers. And from page 1, it was clear to see why.
Dr Anna Fox is a child psychologist currently suffering agoraphobia, a condition that set in after a fearsome car accident. We learn of this some time into the book (but this is not a spoiler). Meanwhile, Anna’s daily life consists of an amalgam of early black and white films, playing computer chess, and helping other agoraphobics online. All of this is larded with what she finds most fascinating: watching through her window those who live opposite her. She uses the telephoto lens on a camera to look ever more closely.
Anna simply cannot venture outside and her visitors are restricted to a psychiatrist dealing with her mind, a physiotherapist dealing with her body, and those who deliver her food and medicines. This somewhat circumscribed world is imbued with Anna’s penchant for merlot, of which she drinks several bottles a day and which interacts poorly with her pills.
Watching through the window a family that has particularly piqued her interest, Anna sees, or believes that she sees, the woman that she assumes is the wife and mother being murdered. Then we are off into a plot with layer after layer of surprise, wrenching the reader this way and that relentlessly. Nobody – including the police – believe Anna, and she is essentially alone, locked within her agoraphobic castle.
Written with grace and panache, The Woman in the Window interweaves early film noir, the complexities of psychological distress and the intricacies of a crime blanketed by layers of suspicion and possibility. The result is an intertwining of Kafka and Hitchcock, of the Coen brothers and Ruth Rendell. In other words, from many perspectives, this is a true psychological thriller.
Above all, though, and what makes this novel so essentially compelling, is that at its centre is a damaged, messed up, psychologically vulnerable woman who is semi-drunk most of the time but who is nevertheless capable of dealing with some terrifying circumstances. Even befuddled by the merlot, she copes, as mystery within mystery unfolds and the reader is knocked from pillar to post.
Anna Fox will stay long in the memory, even though, as a protagonist, she is the opposite of Lee Childs’ Jack Reacher or even Sara Patretsky’s VI Warshawski. It will be interesting to see what AJ Finn does with his next book. The Woman in the Window will be a difficult act to follow.
– Ken Strongman