The Woman in the Window

The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rear Window. Charade. Gaslight. The references come thick and fast for the films that shaped this book. There’s even a line from Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore (Goodness me – why, what was that? Silent be, it was the cat), which only just escapes getting attributed to Shakespeare. Agoraphobic, alcoholic, shut-in Ruth Fox lives life vicariously by spying on her neighbours. Then a family moves into the house across the park. Ruth meets the son and his mother, then witnesses the woman’s murder through the kitchen window. The police are called…and a woman she has never seen before appears claiming to be the boy’s mother.
I’m not generally a fan of first-person narrators who use the present tense, especially if the style of writing goes out of its way to be active. Here it is positively hyperactive, and we have an unreliable narrator to boot. And yet, this is a rare example of a book that claims to be a page-turner and it turns out to be just that. Actually it was so well written that I literally gasped for breath when, towards the end, the narrator is proved unreliable, and her case falls to shreds about her. How could Finn possibly resurrect any of it? The trouble with being so audacious is that, when he does rekindle the story, it feels mediocre compared to what’s gone before and its twists are predictable and expected.
It’s still a good book. It’s just not the great one it could have been.

View all my reviews