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I listened to what's been hyped as this year's big thriller: The Woman in the Window, by A.J. Finn, narrated by Ann Marie Lee. If this is the year's big thriller, it's not going to be a good year for the genre.
It's a mash-up of The Girl on the Train (substance-abusing unreliable witness/narrator), Hitchcock's Rear Window (camera-wielding, confined protagonist spying on neighbors), and Hitchcock's Vertigo (phobic--there it's acrophobia, here it's agoraphobia). (Since the heroine is an old-film buff and references Hitchcock, those movie parallels are obvious.) Unbelievably, the heroine is also a former child psychologist. And for no apparent reason that I can see--there's practically no sense of place in the book--she lives in gentrified townhouse in Harlem.
There's a long setup before anything much happens--and then there's no big payoff. The first requisite twist fell flat--I knew what it was going to be early on; the misdirection was apparent if you've ever read anything in this genre. The final reveal wasn't skillfully done--again, I think most readers would have gotten it long before the heroine did.
It's not a bad book, but it's no standout.
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