Book of the week

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW

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 pricked 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 what Anna has seen, 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 that is blanketed by so many layers of suspicion and possibility that one wonders, with some of the characters, whether or not it actually happened. 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.