Although the story line was ok I didn’t care too much for the style of writing. It was a little hard foe me to follow and the one liners were not that great. Not sure I would recommend this one. ( )

This was a fun book and for me a quick read. Anna is an agoraphobe who can't make herself go out of her house. She tries to cope by watching her neighbors, not unlike Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. This movie is referenced several times along with other classic noir pictures of the 40s and 50s. One particular family she spies on has her fascinated and later obsessed with as she witnesses what she thinks is a murder by Alistair, the husband, of who she thinks is his wife. Turns out in a very twisted ending, it was the teenage son, Ethan, who has murdered his drug addict mother. Ethan then comes after Anna in her home in the climax where she manages to kill him by escaping to the roof in a rain storm. Wanted to read this prior to reading Finn's latest book, End of Story.

KIRKUS: Crackling with tension, and the sound of pages turning, as twist after twist sweeps away each hypothesis you come up with...

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.

One of my favorite movies is Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock. This book (and soon-to-be movie) is very similar to that, except that the person looking out the window is a woman (Anna) and she's not recuperating in a wheelchair. She is an agoraphobe which is why she's always looking out her window. She lives alone but has a very handsome tenant that lives in her basement.

One day, while looking out her window, she is spotted by a woman who lives across the park and the woman comes over to visit Anna and they talk for a few hours. The next night, Anna looks out her window and sees something sinister which nobody else can prove. She begins to wonder if she even saw anything at all or if she completely imagined it.

I don't usually see movies based on books but I sure hope the movie does the book justice. ( )

Thriller

Annoyed with Anna for the middle two thirds,but she improved the last 50 pages. Most of the plot twists I figured out early on. One I didn't. In the end a solid four stars for plotting and writing. ( )