The Woman in the Window

November 6, 2017
Child psychologist Anna Fox, the unreliable narrator of Finn’s gripping first novel, lives out one of the classic films that she loves so well—Hitchcock’s Rear Window. In this modern update, the agoraphobic Anna hasn’t left her Manhattan townhouse in more than 11 months. When she’s not observing the neighbors and photographing them with her digital camera, she’s watching movies, playing chess, and counseling other agoraphobics via an online forum. Then her obsession with the new family across the park begins to take over. When Anna witnesses a stabbing in their house, no one believes what she saw is real—and it’s entirely possible that Anna shouldn’t believe it herself. The secrets of Anna’s past and the uncertain present are revealed slowly in genuinely surprising twists. And, while the language is at times too clever for its own good, readers will eagerly turn the pages to see how it all turns out. This highly anticipated debut has already received endorsements from such notables as Gillian Flynn and Louise Penny. Agent: Jennifer Joel, ICM Partners.

November 1, 2017
A lonely woman in New York spends her days guzzling merlot, popping pills, and spying on the neighbors--until something she sees sucks her into a vortex of terror."The Miller home across the street--abandon hope, all ye who enter here--is one of five townhouses that I can survey from the south-facing windows of my own." A new family is moving in on her Harlem street, and Dr. Anna Fox already knows their names, employment histories, how much they paid for their house, and anything else you can find out using a search engine. Following a mysterious accident, Anna is suffering from agoraphobia so severe that she hasn't left her house in months. She speaks to her husband and daughter on the phone--they've moved out because "the doctors say too much contact isn't healthy"--and conducts her relationships with her neighbors wholly through the zoom lens of her Nikon D5500. As she explains to fellow sufferers in her online support group, food and medication (not to mention cases of wine) can be delivered to your door; your housecleaner can take out the trash. Anna's psychiatrist and physical therapist make house calls; a tenant in her basement pinch-hits as a handyman. To fight boredom, she's got online chess and a huge collection of DVDs; she has most of Hitchcock memorized. Both the game of chess and noir movie plots--Rear Window, in particular--will become spookily apt metaphors for the events that unfold when the teenage son of her new neighbors knocks on her door to deliver a gift from his mother. Not long after, his mother herself shows up...and then Anna witnesses something almost too shocking to be real happening in their living room. Boredom won't be a problem any longer.Crackling with tension, and the sound of pages turning, as twist after twist sweeps away each hypothesis you come up with about what happened in Anna's past and what fresh hell is unfolding now.

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Starred review from November 1, 2017
Funeral March of a Marionette is heard somewhere off in the distance as the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock, for whose TV program that 1872 Gounod piece served as the theme, moves across each page of this neo-noir masterpiece. Grab a bottle of Merlot, and settle in to accompany Anna Fox on her nightmare journey, a journey confined, almost in its entirety, within the walls of her New York City home. Anna suffers from agoraphobia and has carefully arranged her housebound existence around her many medications, including bottles of wine and classic thriller films, as she keeps in contact with her husband and daughter, nurtures fellow agoraphobes in an online support group, plays virtual chess, Skypes French lessons, and maintains close surveillance of her neighbors. Safe from the world outside. Then her cocoon begins to unravel when she witnesses a murder in the house across the way. Sound familiar? However, author Finn has carefully paced Anna's internal narrative and intricately woven interactions (real or imagined?) and added a diabolical dimension that makes this story even more intense than Hitchcock's Rear Window. And when the catalyst for Anna's condition is ultimately revealed, it is far more traumatic than a broken leg. An astounding debut from a truly talented writer, perfect for fans in search of more like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Scheduled for publication in 35 languages and with a film already in development at Fox 2000 with Scott Rudin producing, this could be the first novel that climbs highest on this year's bestseller lists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)