Women- in- peril thrillers will chill you this winter
Is the Girl trend finally Gone? Maybe the “Girl” title trend is taking a mini- break, but two new women- in- peril/ psychological thrillers prove that as 2018 kicks off, publishers are still riding that, ahem, Girl on the Train.
Sure, The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn and The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen easily could have been called The
Girl in the Window and The Girl Between Us, but let’s give the authors props for substituting a couple of serviceable “W” words.
Both books check off the now- familiar best- selling tropes established by Gillian Flynn in 2012’ s masterful
Gone Girl and polished by Paula Hawkins in 2015’ s zippy The Girl on the
Train. Unreliable narrators: check. Damaged, wine- guzzling female protagonists: check. Great big plot twists meant to cause deep inhalations of breath: check. Film rights snapped up: check.
The Woman in the Window ( William Morrow, 427 pp., eeeE ) does have a nice ring to it, and Hitchcock’s
Rear Window is the obvious inspiration ( Girl on the Train’s alcoholic, voyeuristic Rachel can’t be overlooked, either).
Author A. J. Finn, a gender- neutral pseudonym for former William Morrow executive editor Daniel Mallory, knows his classic movies ( there’s even a character named Jane Russell!).
Like James Stewart in Rear Win- dow, Anna Fox is a shut- in who spies on neighbors with a telephoto lens. Unlike Jimmy Stewart, Anna isn’t wheelchair- bound with a broken leg; she’s a child psychologist paralyzed by panic attacks.
Her husband and young daughter have moved out ( why?), so Anna keeps herself occupied by mixing pills and booze, running an online chat for fellow agoraphobics and spying on the new neighbors across the park who paid $ 3.45 million for a “landmark 19th century Harlem gem!” of a brownstone.
Then Anna sees what appears to be a bloody murder through the window … but nobody believes her.
I figured out two of the biggest “reveals” in Window well before they were revealed, and Finn the cine-
phile’s taste for melodrama can get silly ( doorbells ring, cellphones die, thunder crashes!) yet there’s something irresistible about this made- forthe- movies tingler. Finn knows how to pleasurably wind us up. The Wife Between Us ( St. Martin’s
Press, 343 pp., eeeE) bests The Woman in the Window in the didn’tsee- it- coming plot twist category, right on page 147.
The remaining pages, while intriguing, never quite top that jawdropper.
Vanessa has suffered the ultimate New York humiliation: She’s been dumped by her hedge- fund husband, Richard, and trying to make ends meet working at Saks Fifth Avenue waiting on snooty former “friends.” ( She walked away without a settlement in one of the novel's many mysteries.)
Beautiful nursery- school teacher Nellie seems ready to step into Vanessa’s place. Both women have secrets, but so does “too- good- to- true” ( re: controlling) Richard.
Seemingly unstable stalker Vanessa is determined to stop Richard's remarriage to her “replacement.” Is it sheer jealousy, or something else?
The Wife Between Us is built around a deliciously clever premise, and it’s psychologically astute, if a bit dreary.
Danger lurks in Wife, but it’s hard to beat the kooky adrenaline rush of
Window’s pill- popping shut- in fighting for her life on a Harlem rooftop in the rain.