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.