More satisfying is the thread of Anna grappling with her agoraphobia.

Where does Anna come off being so surprised by what you knew all along? Why do we have to sit through the big monologue from the revealed villain again? As a result, the big reveal is a bit of a letdown. You do it because you’re impatient for Anna to catch up to your omniscience and put together the pieces so she can see who’s been lying to her the whole time.

It’s possible to read this book voraciously, in long, luxurious gulps, but you don’t necessarily do it to find out what happens next. The heavy referentiality here is good, propulsive fun, but it has the side effect of making the mystery more than a little predictable. Her murdered neighbor is named Jane Russell, so where’s the equivalent of Jane Russell in disguise as Marilyn Monroe at the end of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes? Anna watches Gaslight, so who’s trying to convince her that she’s crazy? She watches Vertigo, so let’s look out for some doubled blondes. The murder mystery here is a pure Golden Age of Hollywood pastiche, and part of the fun of it is playing spot-the-reference. That last touch is less Eleanor Oliphant or Girl on the Train and more Rear Window, which is one of the movies that Woman in the Window heavily references throughout. Now she spends every day locked in her house alone, drinking and popping prescription pills, and watching her neighbors through her camera. Anna used to be a prominent child psychiatrist, but since her mysterious trauma - which I won’t spoil here - she’s been beset by crippling agoraphobia. Here, the woman is Anna Fox, confined to her home, who thinks she sees her new neighbor in the Harlem brownstone across the street get stabbed through the chest with a letter opener.Īnd like Eleanor Oliphant, Woman in the Window revolves around a woman who has experienced something mysterious and devastating who responds by socially isolating herself, self-medicating with alcohol, and having emotionally vexed phone conversations with absent family members. Like Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window is about a woman who obsessively watches a neighboring family through their windows, and who believes she has witnessed a murder but can’t be quite sure that her recollections are correct, because she’s an alcoholic and was extremely drunk at the time. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark

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