The Woman In The Window

Hitchcock-ian Rollercoaster

If it were possible for a debutant to 'design' a bestseller, then A.J. Finn has done it; The Woman In The Window is a blockbuster of a book and on its way to the screen.

Finn (pseudonym of Dan Mallory) claimed in an interview to The Telegraph (UK), that he thinks like a woman, and his taut thriller with an agoraphobic woman at the centre perhaps proves that.

Unable to step out without getting a panic attack, child psychologist Anna Fox lives alone in a large house, drinks all day and spies on the neighbours through the lens of a camera. The set-up is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window meets Paula Hawkins’ The Girl On The Train. Finn is quite happy to let his influences show—Anna is also a fan of classic black-and-white thriller movies (Vertigo, Gaslight are obvious inspirations)

She has a cat, a hunky tenant, David, in the basement, and weekly visits from her shrink and physiotherapist.  The reader learns that an accident was the cause of her separation from her husband and daughter, as also her current mental state.

When Anna is not watching films or chatting in an agoraphobes’ online support group, she peeks most avidly at new neighbours across the park—the Russells comprising husband Alistair, wife Jane and teenage son Ethan.

The story actually starts when Ethan drops by with a gift from his mother; the woman turns up miraculously when Anna needs help and befriends her. Then Anna sees her being stabbed from her window and manages to call the cops. In trying to reach Jane, she collapses outside her house and is taken to hospital. When she is brought back, there are no traces of a murder, Alistair brings his wife over and she is not the woman Anna met.

The kindly cop, a mountainous man called Little, helps Anna get home and settle in, but to the doctors and the police it seems that the cocktail of pills and wine that she has been swigging have led her to hallucinate the whole scene.

Layers are peeled off gradually, in short chapters, for the reader to get the whole picture of Anna’s life and that of the Russells, and build up to the climax. The astute reader would guess at who did it (maybe not the why), but the book is still heart-stopping, sad and thrilling all at once. Once picked up, it cannot be put down till the last page is turned. And that’s the mark of a good suspense novel.

The Woman In The Window

By AJ Finn

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 448

Little Secrets

Deadly Dolls

Melbourne-based writer Anna Snoekstra’s Little Secrets is a passable crime thriller set in the small town of Colmstock, from which aspiring journalist Rose Blakey is desperate to escape. As she dreams of a job in a newspaper, she works at a pub with her best friend Mia. Her stepfather Rob has given her the ultimatum to move out of the house within a week, and her mother is too weak to protest.  

When Rose's kid sister Laura finds a doll at her doorstep that resembles her, and other little girls do too, Rose sends off a piece to a tabloid, which is accepted. Since this happens soon after a child is killed in a major blaze in the town’s courthouse, people are agitated.

The town’s cops Frank (who loves Rose from afar) and Bazza (who is soft on Mia) are annoyed with the implication that a paedophile is on the loose and they cannot find him. Will, an outsider to the town, becomes prime suspect, and Rose, in order to impress the paper, adds fuel to the speculations. Later, she is unable to stop the series of tragic events that follow her padded up stories. A few red herrings some loose ends and a dash of romance pepper the quick, but forgettable read.

Little Secrets

By Anna Snoekstra

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 332

Fire And Fury:

Inside The Lair

Michael Wolff’s book, Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House is stranger than fiction; if Donald Trump, current President of the United States, had been created by a novelist, people would not have believed such a character could exist. But there he is, ensconced in the White House, keeping the world entertained and terrified with his shenanigans.

Wolff got unprecedented access into the White House, because, as he writes, nobody told him to go away. His book, a terrific blend of fact, gossip, interviews and unnamed sources, written in reckless tell-all tone, makes for a fascinating read, mainly because who would have believed Trump could have become President (nobody in his campaign team thought he would win and his wife Melania, according to Wolff, wept inconsolably when he did), and then hang on, flexing his muscles and shooting his mouth off at every occasion, as the media-–that he hates—slams him repeatedly.

Steve Bannon, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Rupert Murdoch, and a cast of hundreds jump out of the pages of newspapers and TV screens into the book, and Wolff rips many masks off as he goes along.  Making fun of the foot-in-mouth Trump is the media’s delight these days, and Wolff has distilled all that disdain into Fire And Fury.

Many ‘facts’ may have been embellished, but the book is a page-turner— savage, witty and disturbing. It’s a mark of America’s free press and democracy that Wolff could manage to write such a book about the most powerful man in the world.

Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House

By Michael Wolff

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 321

Deep Freeze

Gals And Dolls

Virgil Flowers, used to be the sidekick of Lucas Davenport, hero of John Sandford’s ‘Prey’ series. Then, about ten years ago, the writer gave him a series of his own. Flowers works with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and hangs out with bunch of colourful cohorts when he is not working on a case.

In Deep Freeze, the killer is revealed in the first chapter, so it’s not the who or why but the how he did it that is at the centre of the novel. On the night of her 25^th high school reunion Gina Hemming is fished out of Trippton’s frozen river. Hemming was a rich and powerful woman in the small town and many people had reason to kill her, as Virgil Flowers finds when he starts to investigate. In a previous novel, Flowers had exposed the corrupt school board as well as a dog-napping ring in the town, so he is a bit of a hero there.

The investigation is routine, but there is another mystery to solve. Who is making a range of pornographic Barbie and Ken dolls?  Private detective Margaret Griffin arrives from Los Angeles to hunt for the culprit. Everyone knows the leader of the ring is Virgil’s former classmate Jesse McGovern, but since she is providing employment in a town on the verge of economic ruin, nobody wants to turn her in. In fact, Flowers gets beaten up by a bunch of women and is forced to go about his work with a broken nose and a blue nose guard, for which he gets teased a lot.

The best part of Sandford’s books is the humour-- the characters are funny, the dialogue crackling and Virgil Flowers a very likeable cop.

Deep Freeze

By John Sandford

Publisher: Putnam

Pages: 391

East Of Hounslow

The Accidental Terrorist

Javid “call me Jay” Qasim lives in London, and is proud of being so assimilated, that no cops ever pulls him over. He has no great objections to being called Paki because he knows what the ignorant racist whites don’t—that it means pure. He looks down his nose the shalwar-wearing louts in his community and goes to the mosque once a week, just to prove his Muslim credentials.

Jay, a smalltime drug dealer, is the wry and clear-headed protagonist of Khurrum Rahman’s excellent debut novel, East Of Hounslow. He lives with his widowed mother, who is completely against the stereotype of the pious Muslim woman, and soon after the book opens, she flies off to with her British boyfriend, leaving the shattered Jay alone.

The neighbourhood mosque is vandalized, and Jay helps clean up because he happens to be there; he also gets pulled into a revenge act of violence, only to protect his childhood friend, the naïve and impressionable Parvez, from the likes of Khan Abdul and his thick-headed cohorts. In the melee, his new BMW is trashed, and a bag full of drugs to sell and money he owes his boss, Silas, are stolen. Before he knows it, his life is on a quick downward spiral.

Through the words put in the mouth of Jay, Rahman presents a remarkably accurate and honest picture of the Islamic world today, and slams terrorism while also emphasizing that a majority of Muslims are peace-loving, and all mosques are not breeding grounds of jihad. Like the others of his community Jay does not think that his friend Idris, who is a cop, is a sellout; still, when Khan berates him for not standing by his people, Jay understands his point of view.

Suddenly, the tone of the book turns dark, as Jay is threatened by Silas’s goons if he does not cough up the money owed, and a school-bombing in Canada deeply affects the happy-go-lucky bloke. It’s the time for MI5’s Kinsgley Parker to recruit him as an undercover agent to keep an eye on extremist activity in the Muslim-dominated area.

It would be a spoiler to give out more of the plot, but it does take a couple of Bollywood-like twists. The book is as thought-provoking, as it is entertaining-- which is a fine combination for a thriller.

East Of Hounslow

By Khurrum Rahman

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 350

Uncommon Type

The Star Writes

Hollywood star Tom Hanks is famously a collector of vintage typewriters. He is also an occasional writer, whose stories have been published in magazines like The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

Uncommon Type is his collection of seventeen quirky stories that begin with a picture of a typewriter and also feature the now outdated writing machine in minor or major roles.

Hanks is observant, has a sense of humour and an ear for dialogue—the story about an actor being taken on a press junket is hilarious.  The stories vary in tone and style, however—the story about a woman buying a second-hand typewriter and trying to get it repaired is sweet, the sci-fi stories starring the nutty and hyperactive Anna are bizarre.

The characters cover a wide spectrum—a newly-divorced woman who avoids her cheery neighbor; the billionaire who goes time-travelling and falls in love with a woman from the past; a young man who goes surfing with his father on his nineteenth birthday and stumbles on an unpleasant secret.

He may not be as skilled a writer a he is an actor, but the stories show that he is not insular and self-absorbed as stars tend to be—he does look around and see life beyond Hollywood.

Uncommon Type

By Tom Hanks

Publisher: Knopf

Pages: 416

The Power

Zap-Happy Women

Naomi Alderman’s The Power made it to practically every list of the best books of 2017, and won the Baileys prize for women's fiction.

It is the kind of sci-fi novel, that, for a few pages at least, feels empowering to women. Alderman imagines a scenario when women get an electric change in their bodies, with which they can give men shocks—mild as well as heart-attack inducing lethal. When they discover this power, they become fearless; now they can walk the streets at any time, while boys and men cower at home in terror.

It starts with teenage girls, who can gift it to older women; then girl children are born with a ‘skein’ under their collarbones, and women become invincible—almost.  There are revolutions in patriarchal societies from Riyadh to Delhi, and a religious movement inadvertently started, that feminizes faith by turning God into a She. The leader of this cult is Allie, who escapes an abusive adoptive father and lands up in a convent, full of battered girls who have discovered their power and come together under that generous roof to cope with their lives. Allie, who has conversations in her mind with a divine power, becomes Mother Eve, a spiritual healer and face of this new female supremacy.

Meanwhile, Roxy, daughter of a London gangster uses her power to take over her father’s criminal empire; Margot Cleary, Mayor of an American town fuels her political ambition; in Moldova, centre of the flesh trade, women under the leadership of Tatiana Moskalev, the wife of the suddenly-dead President, form a female-led country called Bessapara.  Recording these surges of female control all over the world, is self-taught Nigerian journalist, Tunde, the only male in this posse of women protagonists.

Alderman does not turn this new world into an Amazonian utopia; everything soon descends into chaos, the men start fighting back and women start behaving just like depraved and power-crazed men. In Moskalev’s dominion, men cannot step out without a female guardian, they cannot drive and cannot travel.  And of course, women who can’t or won’t use their power are given names like gimp, flick, flat battery, pzit (“the sound of a woman trying to make a spark and failing”).

The role-reversal book is structured like a thriller—it starts with a murder—and throws in thought-provoking questions into the nature of power; is it ever possible for those in a position of authority to use it for good? Or, to quote Lord Acton, absolute power corrupts absolutely. For no other reason except a whim, the story is bookended with correspondence between Neil Adam Armon the writer of this “historical novel,” about a period that came to be known as Cataclysm, and Naomi Alderman from whom he seeks approval of his manuscript.

The Power has many layers, but mainly debunks the idea that a world in which women rule would be enriched by love and kindness.  Alderman’s imagined dystopia is scary and without hope.

The Power

By Naomi Alderman

Publisher: Little Brown

Pages: 386

The Bitch Is Back

Soul-Searching Women

About fifteen years ago, Cathi Hanauer has edited a best-selling book of essays titled The Bitch In The House, in which 26 women told “the truth about Se Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage.”  What that book talked out was post-feminism women, who had careers and husbands they chose, but found themselves exhausted with the effort to live up to their own high expectations and trying to do it all.

Some of them write again in The Bitch Is Back, about the experiences gained in the intervening years, and some new writers enter the list of 26 women with their own perspectives on what it like to be a woman in the 21^st century with all the choices they have been able to make.

There is, of course, the problem of ageing in a youth-obsessed world, and though the tone of the writing is upbeat and often witty, there is still an underlying whine about men, sex and the insecurities of growing older (there has to be one essay on nips, tucks and hormone therapy to look young). When you’d expect that that many of them have reached the age when they ought not to give a damn about anyone or anything, they are still caught up in the conventions of coupledom (including a “non-radical” lesbian couple) or the lack of it.

This is by no means a representation of the experiences of all women, but going by this book, if youthful anger is simply replaced by middle-aged angst in some and resignation in others, when are women ever truly happy or fulfilled?

The Bitch Is Back: Older, Wiser, And (Getting) Happier

Edited by Cathi Hanauer

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 338

Secrets In Death

Death By Gossip

J.D. Robb is the name Nora Roberts uses to write her crime books. Lt . Eve Dallas is the heroine of the futuristic ‘Death’ series, a cop married to a handsome Irish millionaire. Roarke is a criminal turned business baron, who not just keeps his wife in designer clothes, but also helps with her investigations using resources only he can pull out of his hat.

In Secrets In Death (the 45^th in the series, set in 2061), Dallas has just dropped into a fancy Manhattan bar (owned by her husband), that she finds too fancy, to meet a woman she does not like -- forensic anthropologist Dr. Garnet DeWinter. In no time a murder has been committed, and she finds herself in the unenviable role of investigator and witness; the victim, who bleeds to death in front of the shocked eyes of the bar’s wealthy patrons, is the much hated gossip columnist Larinda Mars. Many people have reason to kill Larinda, who ruthlessly wrecked the lives and careers of those who did not bow to her blackmailing for money and dirt on others.

As Dallas and her partner Delia Peabody starts to dig into Larinda’s life, they realise just how greedy and evil she was, but that does not mean that her murderer can get away.

The relationship between Eve and Roarke is as romantic and the trail of the murderer is exciting. A breezy read for Robb/Roberts fans.

Secrets In Death

By J.D. Robb

Publisher: St. Martin's

Pages: 384