Move Over, Girl on the Train. The Woman is in the Window Now.

We may be just four months in to the year [despite the current East Coast weather throwing it back to February], but I can say with full confidence that I’ve already pinpointed 2018’s standout thriller. I read The Woman in the Window during a solo 16-hour layover in Los Angeles, and I paid no mind to the stares I received every time I let out an audible gasp—which became a more frequent occurrence as the book progressed. It’s hard to accurately convey how excellent The Woman in the Window was without some major spoilers, but I’ll do my best…

Anna, the thriller’s protagonist, is a film noir fanatic. After experiencing an unspeakable trauma, which remains undisclosed until a jaw-dropping paragraph about two-thirds of the way through the book, she lives her life entirely within the confines of her Harlem townhouse, film noir and spying on her neighbors her only two guilty pleasures. When a new family moves into the townhouse across the way, she is enamored by their idyllic family life—until, one night, she witnesses something unspeakable occur in their home—and is completely powerless to convince those around her that the family members, and all those around them, are in grave danger.

I’ve read many a thriller at this point, and become fairly seasoned at predicting the ‘shocking’ plot twists and ‘surprise’ endings; in the case of The Woman in the Window, as mentioned above, I genuinely gasped in shock on multiple occasions. The twists and turns occurred at a perfect pace [nothing worse than a thriller that’s completely confusing until a messy attempt to wrap things up all in the span of a few pages at the very end of the book], and all of the twists, while unpredictable [hence this heavily abridged review], were also completely feasible. I can almost hear the Hollywood execs fighting for the rights to this feature film now…

 Photo Cred, since I'm the worst and left my copy on the airplane: NPR