The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn

Sometimes the latest and greatest thrillers don’t live up to the hype, but that’s not the case for The Woman in the Window. It’s a taut and unpredictable story about a devastated woman who spends too much time spying on her neighbors and eventually sees something awful – or does she? Sure, there are some tropes involved: the wine, the gaslighting, etcetera, etcetera. In fact, I am kind of done reading about drunk, unreliable women, but if you want to read one last one before the genre goes belly up, this is the best of the recent crop for sure. Anna has been housebound for the last 10 months after a traumatic experience that also involved her husband and child leaving her. While she still speaks to them regularly, she is increasingly isolated in her Harlem house, and distracts herself by looking at the goings on outside, various online pursuits, and copious amounts of wine and psychotropic meds, which should not be mixed together. When a new family moves in across the way, she’s immediately drawn into their lives, seeing things she wasn’t meant to see. The first “reveal” as to why Anna suddenly developed a bad case of agoraphobia is no big surprise, nor do I think it was really meant to be – anyone paying attention will figure it out about 100 pages in, though the reveal takes another 100 pages or so to come. It’s the end game that you want to keep reading for, with a well-done twist that I didn’t see coming.  

Fractured by Catherine McKenzie

Fractured, by Catherine McKenzie, is her finest book yet. Told in two timelines, it follows a year in Julie Apple's life after she moves to Cincinnati to escape a stalker, and a 12-hour day at then end of that year where a grand jury trial is taking place because someone has been killed. Who that person is and how it came to pass is a mystery which slowly unfurls throughout the novel, but it's not a slow read, and you'll find yourself racing through to the next chapter to try and pick up more clues as to what eventually happened and why.

A big theme in this book is the nasty way we can treat each other even as adults. Julie moved her family across the country because someone had it out for her, only to land in a new neighborhood where mean and petty behavior ran rife. With all of the current focus on grade school bullies, we often forget that adults can be bullied (and bully) as well. You'll identify with Julie if you feel like you're trapped in a high-school-like circle of friends, and want to smack some sense into the mean-girl neighbors of hers. Is that what Julie did? Or were they the ones to gang up on her? You'll have to read to the end to find out!

On a side note, the character of Julie Apple is an author who had a bestselling book called The Murder Game, which is part of what drew the attention of her stalker to her. That book is also being released in a couple of weeks in a fun book within a book way.