The Thriller Everyone Read on the Subway in 2018

A woman, a window, a whole lot of merlot

Here’s the setup. Anna Fox is a child psychologist who no longer leaves her Harlem brownstone, ever, for reasons the book dangles in front of you for three hundred pages like a piece of bacon over a dog’s nose. She drinks too much, mixes it with pills she definitely shouldn’t be mixing it with, watches old movies (Hitchcock, obviously, and the book wants you to notice that it wants you to notice), and spies on her neighbors through a very nice camera lens because what else is a shut-in with a psychology degree going to do with her days.

Enter the Russells, a new family across the park. Enter Jane Russell, warm and a little too eager to befriend her weird recluse neighbor, who Anna likes instantly and completely. Enter, a short while later, Anna watching through her window as Jane appears to get murdered. Enter everyone in Anna’s life, including the actual police, treating her like she made the whole thing up, because she’s an agoraphobic alcoholic with a fondness for old black and white movies about women who think they saw something they didn’t.

Look, if you’ve seen Rear Window or The Girl on the Train adjacent anything, you know the shape of this immediately. The book knows you know. It’s not hiding it. Anna literally watches Rear Window in the book while thinking about how her situation resembles Rear Window. That’s either a wink or a crutch depending on how generous you’re feeling that day.

What actually works, and what made me want to throw the book across a hotel room

What works: the claustrophobia. Finn (or, well, the writer behind that name, more on that in a second) is genuinely good at making a single house feel like a pressure cooker. The chapters are short, almost aggressively short, the kind of short where you tell yourself “one more” four times in a row and suddenly it’s 1am and you have a flight to catch. The prose isn’t beautiful but it moves, and there’s a real skill in making a shut-in’s daily routine of wine and Zoloft and old movies feel tense rather than tedious.

I also think Anna herself is more interesting than the plot mechanics give her credit for. Her grief, once you get to what actually happened to her, is rendered with more genuine feeling than the thriller-plot scaffolding around it deserves. There’s a scene fairly deep in where she’s talking to her estranged husband on the phone, performing normalcy for him while everything around her is falling apart, and it’s the one place in the book where I forgot I was reading a puzzle box and just felt something for her.

Now the part where I get cranky. The twist, when it lands, is not surprising if you’ve read more than two or three books in this genre. I called the broad shape of it around the one-third mark, on a plane, half asleep, which is not exactly forensic literary analysis on my part. That’s not a fatal flaw on its own, plenty of thrillers succeed despite predictable twists because the getting-there is fun. But this one leans so hard on “gasp, didn’t see that coming” energy in its marketing and pacing that when you do see it coming, the back third sags. There’s also a supporting cast that mostly exists to be suspicious in rotation, like the book is running a checklist: creepy neighbor, unstable teen, shifty husband, next.

And I have to be honest about the elephant in the room, because pretending it isn’t there feels dishonest. A.J. Finn is a pen name for Dan Mallory, and the plagiarism accusations and general scandal around him that came out after publication colored how I read the second half, whether I wanted it to or not. I’m not going to pretend that context doesn’t seep into the reading experience for a lot of people, myself included. It doesn’t make the sentences on the page different, but it does make you read them a little more suspiciously, which feels appropriate for a book about a narrator nobody believes.

Tangent, sorry, but: I think this book is a perfect example of the difference between “well constructed” and “original.” It is genuinely well constructed. The chapter breaks, the reveal timing, the way information gets withheld from Anna and therefore from us, all of that is competent, even skillful. It’s just also assembled almost entirely out of other, better books’ parts. Whether that bothers you is a taste question, and my taste apparently doesn’t mind it at 35,000 feet with a bad in-flight movie as the alternative.

This is a thriller for people who love thrillers so much they’ve stopped needing them to be new, just well timed.

About A.J. Finn

A.J. Finn is the pen name of Dan Mallory, a former book editor who apparently spent years in publishing quietly absorbing exactly which levers make a domestic thriller sell before deciding to pull all of them himself. The Woman In The Window was his debut and it hit hard commercially before a lengthy profile exposed a pattern of fabrications in his personal history and career claims, which turned the book’s success into a genuinely strange footnote in publishing history. Whatever you think of the man, the book still exists on its own and still works as a book, which is an uncomfortable but true thing to say.

If this hooked you (or wrecked you), read these next

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, the unreliable-narrator-through-glass template this whole subgenre keeps remixing, and honestly the better constructed of the two. Rear Window itself, the Cornell Woolrich story or the Hitchcock film, because you should know exactly what you’re being handed. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides if you want a twist that actually lands harder than this one does. And Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris if you want the same “is this woman crazy or is everyone gaslighting her” engine with a meaner, tighter execution.

For your book club

1. Did you guess the twist before it was revealed, and did that change how you felt about the rest of the book?
2. How much does knowing about Dan Mallory’s real-life controversies affect your reading of Anna as an unreliable narrator?
3. Is Anna’s addiction and agoraphobia handled with genuine empathy, or used mainly as a plot device to make her unreliable?
4. Which side character did you suspect most, and did the book earn that suspicion or just plant it?
5. Does the constant nod to Hitchcock and old films work as a clever layer, or does it feel like the book pointing at better stories than itself?