‘Women are three dimensional and flawed, just like men’

Author Daniel Mallory talks to the Irish Independent about his book, The Woman in the Window, and the success that followed.

When he outed himself as AJ Finn - a deliberately gender-neutral nom de plume he took on partly "because up until December I was still working and I didn't want my authors to see their editor's name scrawled across a hardback in the bookshop", partly "because I'm a private person" - it was the 'poacher turned gamekeeper' pieces that annoyed him the most. "Because no book is sure-fire and, far from being easy, this was a labour of love. "So these journalists intent on suggesting, or even asserting, that I know the secret ingredients needed to cook up a bestseller are wrong. There is no secret sauce. If there were, I would have written a huge bestseller long ago."

Review of The Woman in the Window @ Melisende's Library

Review: The Woman in the Window by AJ Finn

For me, this is a homage to Hitchcock's "Rear Window" and "The Lady Vanishes" - a disturbed woman witnesses something - and no one around her believes it.  This is what initially drew me to this title.

Whilst this is a slow moving story initially, the "flashbacks" are used sparingly to illustrate certain points in the backstory of the main character, Dr Anna Fox. We descend into Anna's private hell as she struggles to discern what is real and what is imagined. To add to the complexity, Anna is suffering from agoraphobia after undergoing a personal tragedy.

I enjoyed the references to many well known classic movies - many of which I myself have watched - Anna and I have something in common, which I guess is what drew me to her.

The writing is suspenseful, intricate, absorbing - this is a real page turner that will one day itself become one of those classic noir crime stories. If Hitchcock were alive, he'd be adapting this for the big screen.

Sampler- A. J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window

From Better Reading:

She sits and she watches and she waits. Anna Fox, the central character in the one of the decade’s most anticipated thrillers, The Woman in the Window, is a ‘shut-in,’ unable to go outside her New York home. Spying on her neighbours is her pet pastime, alongside drinking wine, watching old movies and recalling happy memories.

She knows everyone’s little habits, their relationships, their schedules. Creepy. Nothing escapes Anna’s vigilance, especially when newcomers like the Russells move into the house across the street. A father, mother and their teenage son, they seem like a perfectly normal family.

But one night there’s a blood curdling scream and Anna thinks she sees something terrible happen in their house, something so dreadful she can’t ignore. She has to tell someone.

Forced to make contact with the outside world, the reclusive life Anna has so carefully contrived begins to crumble. Problem is, in broad daylight it’s evident to everyone, police included, that Anna is heavily medicated, drinking and depressed. Nor is there a shred of evidence that the murder ever happened. Not a drop of blood. No other witnesses. No-one missing.

Other questions begin piling up: how did a skilled, well-respected professional like Anna, end up like this? What trauma set her life into a spiral? And why is she separated from the husband and daughter she so clearly loves and misses?

But it’s the over-arching question – is such an unreliable witness to be taken seriously – that will absorb readers the most. Anna seems crazy, yet even through the haze of drugs and drink, she is an astute observer. What is real? What is imagined? Who to trust?

While Anna tries to sober up and think straight, inside the darkened depths of the home that is her fortress, strange things begin to happen ....... read sample chapter here