A psychological page turner

The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn is the perfect book when it is cold and blustery outside, preferably snowing too, and all you want is a page-turner with which to curl up as you sip your hot chocolate (or wine).  Inevitable comparisons will be made to The Girl on the Train; both are told from the point of view of a woman in her 30’s who has suffered a marriage break-up and drowns herself in alcohol.  Like Hawkins’ narrator Rachel, Anna Fox, a child psychologist penned in her Harlem brownstone for 10 months by a case of agoraphobia, observes a seemingly happy family across the street and she fantasizes a bit about their lives as well as those of her other neighbors.  An amateur photographer, she peers through her Nikon zoom lens, spying on those her limited world view offers.  Shortly after the new family moves in, Anna meets the wife, Jane Russell, and her teenage son, Ethan, and soon after witnesses a shocking scene that moves her to leave her house and to contact the police.  As in Train, the police are skeptical and we, as readers, see Anna, on her third bottle of merlot and having downed narcotics for her anxiety, as potentially unreliable.  Anna is also a fan of old movies, re-watching "Gaslight," "Strangers on a Train" and - eerily paralleling her own story, "Rear Window." Have the movies caused her to create her own drama to help her escape her isolated life?  You wonder, but because the story is told from Anna’s point of view, you have to believe something strange is going on.  Finn has a series of twists and turns that keep the book going.  You don’t find out the nature of the event that has so traumatized Anna until halfway through and a few red herrings distract from the clever resolution.  Ultimately, this is a better book than Train, a story of love and loss whose themes reverberate through the lives of multiple characters. I wasn't all that interested in seeing the movie version of Train, despite the presence of Emily Blunt in the title role, because I never found Rachel all that endearing or sympathetic.  Anna too is a mess and she, like most people, creates some of her own problems, yet I found myself rooting for her.  Window is a well-constructed mystery that leaves you thinking about what really goes on behind the facades of other people's lives.