The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn

Happy Tuesday, readers! Today I'm a stop on the TLC blog tour for A. J. Finn's debut, The Woman in the Window.

Anna Fox hasn't left her home in almost a year. She suffers from agoraphobia, the result of an accident she's physically recovered from but that still affects her mentally.

To fill her time, Anna plays chess online, spends time in an online forum for fellow agoraphobics, and spies on her neighbors. Yes, spies. She even uses her camera to get a better view. She knows, for example, that the new neighbor is having an affair. She also knows that the husband has only narrowly missed catching her. And the other new family across the way has caught her eye as well. Fortunately, Jane Russell is understanding of Anna's plight and even seems open to becoming friends.

But then Anna witnesses Jane's murder. And no one believes her. Especially when another woman claiming to be Jane, a woman Anna has never seen before, meets the police alive and well.

This story might sound familiar to a well-versed thriller fan. It's Rear Window, of a sort. But rather than an injured Jimmy Stewart, we have agoraphobic therapist Anna Fox.

Anna is on a number of medications. And she drinks much more than she should, especially paired with the pills. So of course everyone believes she imagined it when she frantically calls the police claiming her neighbor has been stabbed. But Anna knows what she saw! Or does she?

Throughout the book, Anna fights with the question of her sanity, bouncing back and forth between confidence in her mental state and confidence in what she saw, and being convinced she may have hallucinated it all. Even when strange things start happening in her own home, she can't be sure if she's imagining it all.

I really enjoyed the narrative style - yes, it's another unreliable narrator of a sort but in Finn's hands it never felt stale or ho hum. That's because Anna herself is such a strong character. She's fond of merlot (buys it by the case), she's a classic film aficionado (thrillers in particular), and, because of her profession, she's got a logic and understanding about her situation that makes it that much more interesting. She knows all the ins and outs but her own mind and body war against that logic.

Of course the plot, which is much more than Rear Window - but I won't give that away, is what makes the story really interesting. But paired with Anna, Finn again makes it unique. Not to mention compulsively readable!

The Woman in the Window has been getting lots of attention and hype, which did affect how I approached the book. I was concerned that it just wouldn't live up to everything I was hearing. Thankfully, it did!

To see more stops on the tour be sure to check out the official TLC tour page here.

For more on A. J. Finn you can follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Purchase Links: HarperCollins | Amazon | Barnes & Noble