‘The Woman in the Window’: Here, a Pinch of Hitchcock.There, a Sprinkle of Christie.
The rocket fuel propelling “The Woman in the Window,” the first stratosphere-ready mystery of 2018, is expertise. Its author is billed as A.J. Finn, perhaps to leave open the possibility in readers’ minds that this entry in the “Gone Girl"/"The Girl on the Train” sweepstakes was written by a woman, as most have been.
Posted — UpdatedThe rocket fuel propelling “The Woman in the Window,” the first stratosphere-ready mystery of 2018, is expertise. Its author is billed as A.J. Finn, perhaps to leave open the possibility in readers’ minds that this entry in the “Gone Girl"/"The Girl on the Train” sweepstakes was written by a woman, as most have been.
But its author is Dan Mallory, a longtime editor of mystery fiction. He is well versed in the tricks of the trade; he credits James Patterson as a helpful influence, particularly when it comes to short chapters. Mallory has edited recent “Agatha Christie” novels, but Christie never wrote an action scene packed with special effects just right for the movie version.
Mallory also clearly knows a lot about the more diabolical elements in Hitchcock movies. And he hasn’t been shy, as Finn, about plugging them into his plot. “The Woman in the Window” starts out with a “Rear Window” setup: Anna Fox spies on her neighbors, looking from her gentrified Harlem town house into theirs. She is housebound (agoraphobia) but thinks she witnesses a crime. And now for a dose of “The Girl on the Train”: Anna is a whopping drunk who also takes many prescription drugs, none of which should be mixed with alcohol. Dear other books with unreliable narrators: This one will see you and raise you.
All of this is very familiar, to the point where “The Woman in the Window” starts off feeling ordinary. It reads too much like another knockoff while the author sets up his very basic story elements. (At heart, this is a locked-room mystery in the great Christie tradition.) We need a rundown of who the neighbors are, especially the Russells, the family Anna spies on most avidly. We need to know about Anna’s past life as a child psychiatrist, and about the husband and daughter who have abandoned her in the house. We need to raise eyebrows about the terse, hunky tenant in the basement.
Once the book gets going, it excels at planting misconceptions everywhere. You cannot trust anything you read. Even Anna can be made to doubt her own actions and memories, and she has absolutely no allies. Everyone on the street thinks she is peculiar, and that’s the best-case scenario. When she deals with the police — an inevitable interaction in this genre — they happen to notice that she has stockpiled enough wine and prescription drugs to sedate an army. There’s no chance they will ever believe anything she says as the danger level rises.
For hard-core aficionados of classic logical mysteries, this book includes some special delights. Its nods to contemporary tastes are offset by things like a reference to “The Thinking Machine,” the nickname of Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, a fictional amateur detective created by Jacques Futrelle. Van Dusen was beloved in his time, but that time was so long ago that Futrelle died on the Titanic. Finn knows commerce but he also knows the classics, old and new. He truly aspires to write in their tradition.
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Publication Notes:
‘The Woman in the Window’
By A.J. Finn
427 pages. William Morrow. $26.99.
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