The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn

I draw a breath and guess again, "You enjoy manipulating others."
--A.J. Finn, The Woman in the Window (William Morrow, 2018).

The Woman in the Window is the latest of the books influenced by Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (see my posting of May 6, 2014), with an unreliable narrator suffering from agoraphobia and dipsomania.  It is indeed something of a page-turner, which I don't mean as a compliment, since so-called "page-turners" are big on plot but little else; I like to enjoy and even savor the quality of the writing before I turn the page.  Finn does indeed move the plot along effectively, helped considerably by writing the novel in the present tense and the first person, even though the extensive dialogue and lack of description make it seem more like an outline for a movie than a novel.

Anna Fox, the narrator of the book, spends a great deal of time watching Hitchcock movies and it is unclear if her misunderstanding of them comes from Finn or is part of Fox's inebriated thinking, because Finn's novel is more one of surprise than psychological suspense. As is the case with other imitators of Gone Girl one would not want to re-read this book after the unsurprising surprises are revealed, slowly and gradually in order to manipulate the reader; a Hitchcock film always gives one pleasure no matter how many times one has seen it.  It is simply a question of artistry.  I can't help but think that Finn's book would have been better if he had been less influenced by (a misunderstood) Hitchcock and more influenced by the corrosive fatalism of Fritz Lang, who made an elegant film also called The Woman in the Window in 1944,