Redheaded Reviews: The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn

This book is meant to remind you of the Hitchcock movie Rear Window. As a matter of fact, it brings that movie up several times as the main character is a fan of old suspense movies and is constantly watching them. Dr. Annie Fox is a child psychiatrist and an agoraphobe who is separated from her husband and her daughter who moved away from their New York City home to a place of their own far away after the incident and she talks to them daily by phone.

The book starts on Sunday, October 24 with the moving in of a new family, the Russells. The teenage son, Ethan comes over and gives her a lavender candle as a gift from his mom, Jane. Annie spends her time looking out her window through the lens of her camera spying on her neighbors and observing their lives.

On Halloween, some kids egg her door and when she tries to make an attempt to stop them she falls flat on the ground at her doorstep. That's when Jane Russell shows up and gets her back inside her house and puts a little bit of brandy inside of her. She happens to be holding a photo album of her son Ethan and shows her the pictures. Annie's basement dwelling tenet David cleans up the eggs for her when he gets back from one of his jobs.

Annie spends a great deal of time drinking wine that she swallows her meds with which is dangerous. She also goes online and helps others on a website forum for agoraphobes. She helps lots of people but she's feeling particularly proud of the work she's doing with GrannyLizzie in Montana who is a good listener and helping her talk about what happened to her to cause her agoraphobia.

Then one night she hears a scream across the street and calls over there to see if everything is all right but Alistair, the cold hard man who seems to bring fear into his son claims nothing is wrong. Earlier when Jane had visited again she said that Alistair could be controlling and looked worried. Neither one of them wants Annie interfering with Alistair.

Then one night after drinking two bottles of wine and having one of her suspense movies on, Annie looks out her window through her camera and sees Jane arguing with someone across the street and then sees blood on her chest and a silver object sticking out of her chest. She drops the camera and runs to find her phone and call 911. After calling them she realizes she must go over there to try to give Jane medical attention and try to save her. So she grabs her umbrella which is the one thing that worked once before to get her to walk a few feet outside by wielding an open umbrella in front of her.

But she doesn't make it all the way across the street. She only makes it halfway and ends up in the park in the middle before collapsing. The police find her there and take her in once they realize who she is. She is forced to explain her situation to them and they tell her they searched her home whose door was open since they weren't sure which home was the one being attacked and found the wine bottles and the pills and suspect that she imagined the whole thing. It gets worse when they take her home and Alistair produces Jane Russell and its a different woman altogether.

Who is this imposter if the real Jane Russell was murdered? Or did she imagine the whole thing? David was over at the Russell home helping to put together bookshelves but he never saw the wife or heard the scream, however, he says he had his headphones on and wouldn't have heard one if there'd been one. Ethan seems really terrified to speak out against his father and what is going on in the house and he seems to be lying to protect his parents from the police and to Annie.

As the book slowly unfolds you begin to learn what really happened to her to make her an agoraphobe and it's unbelievable. You really want to tell her to cool it with all the wine drinking. I mean she drinks vast amounts of the stuff. It's causing her to lose credibility with others. Not to mention it's bad for her. This book is a suspenseful as the movies she watches. You can't flip through the pages fast enough to find out what happens next. It's filled with lots of "gotcha" moments and you really don't know where it's going until you get there. Annie is an interesting character. She is a broken woman who used to be a strong woman who made her living repairing some of the most broken children. Physician heals thyself does not apply here because she is incapable of doing so. But in her brokenness, she is a compelling character because she could be any of us. This is a truly remarkable book and one worth reading. I very highly recommend reading it.

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