When she deals with the police - an inevitable interaction in this genre - they happen to notice that she has stockpiled enough wine and prescription drugs to sedate an army. Everyone on the street thinks she is peculiar, and that’s the best-case scenario. Even Anna can be made to doubt her own actions and memories, and she has absolutely no allies. Once the book gets going, it excels at planting misconceptions everywhere. (‘ This is no dream! This is really happening!’ - Mia Farrow, Rosemary’s Baby.)” At one point, after Anna has dutifully invoked “Gaslight,” the book also throws in: “Because it was no dream. But despite the value of “show, don’t tell” for any writer, this author loves using examples to a fault. There are shades of Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt,” “Vertigo,” “Spellbound,” “Suspicion” and, of course, George Cukor’s “Gaslight,” which has an enormous influence on the whole book (and has influenced many of its predecessors). This will work better later, when the book intercuts movie dialogue from the DVDs Anna watches with what is actually happening in her real world. We don’t need a lot of flaunting of the author’s cineaste credentials, but we get it anyway. Dear other books with unreliable narrators: This one will see you and raise you. And now for a dose of “The Girl on the Train”: Anna is a whopping drunk who also takes many prescription drugs, none of which should be mixed with alcohol. She is housebound (agoraphobia) but thinks she witnesses a crime. “The Woman in the Window” starts out with a “Rear Window” setup: Anna Fox spies on her neighbors, looking from her gentrified Harlem townhouse into theirs. And he hasn’t been shy, as Finn, about plugging them into his plot. Mallory also clearly knows a lot about the more diabolical elements in Hitchcock movies.
Mallory has edited recent “Agatha Christie” novels, but Christie never wrote an action scene packed with special effects just right for the movie version. He is well versed in the tricks of the trade he credits James Patterson as a helpful influence, particularly when it comes to short chapters. Finn, perhaps to leave open the possibility in readers’ minds that this entry in the “Gone Girl”/”The Girl on the Train” sweepstakes was written by a woman, as most have been.īut its author is Dan Mallory, a longtime editor of mystery fiction.
The rocket fuel propelling “The Woman in the Window,” the first stratosphere-ready mystery of 2018, is expertise.
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