The thriller likes a lot of coincidences that generate disturbing scenarios. Because we all know that a cop or an investigator has his resources to confront evil and become a hero day in and day out. The question is when the characters look out from chance to the wild side of life. That take a walk on the wild side What would Lou Reed say...
And Finn is very into that punishing victim-friendly thing. Because he knows that he has won over the common mortal readers of the black genre. Strange people always looking for sinister events in other people's skins.
Then there is the classic touch that AJ Finn gives to his first novels. We can always find in them an invitation to the deduction typical of the most classic police detective. Something very appreciated so that the thing is not simply blood under the excuse of duty.
This is how good old Finn managed to hit hard the first time and this is how he will continue to shake the market as he finds new plots to offer us..., at the moment not with the cadence of the bestsellers (perhaps a wise decision to not be devoured by the editorial machinery), but at least ensuring the surprise factor of the author who seems to have dedicated himself to something else to return with greater intensity if possible.
Top recommended novels by AJ Finn
The woman at the window
The art of suspense narrative is born from a kind of osmosis between the character and the environment. The good writer of thrillers manages that ability to lead us from side to side of the membrane that filters us from the protagonist's particular perspective to a threatening, looming environment ..., in which everything indicates that something serious is going to happen, halfway through between curiosity and fear.
In this novel AJ Finn emerges as a great thriller writer. A new name to take into account. A young columnist for important American newspapers who, like Joel Dicker, contributes new registers of freshness and originality to a genre always in need of new voices to rediscover psychological tension as a rich entertainment narrative. (Be careful, I always insist that “entertainment” is not pejorative. El Quijote it was one of the first great adventure novels and therefore entertainment, without going any further).
This novel The Woman in the Window, whose title already evokes a classic symbol of the genre (cinematic classicism to which in a certain way it resorts as a whole), invites us to inhabit the same New York home as Anna Fox. A woman confined between her four walls and also locked in her past, which she drinks to forget or to try to remember in her alcohol delusions. Until the Russells appear in her life...
The one that seems an exemplary family happens to occupy the house opposite. Anna observes them with that curiosity of someone who contemplates with melancholy the happiness of others. Until the ideal prospect falls apart.
Anna sees, or thinks she has seen (alcohol is not a good friend of the objective facts on which to report to the authority) a particular and sinister family event. The Russells then cease to compose a beautiful picture to acquire an absolutely dark, atrocious tint.
Now Anna is alone. Too late for anyone to pay attention to her. Too late to escape from her own house that trapped her a long time ago. And what's worse... In almost all likelihood the Russells know that Anna saw something.
Finding out to what extent Anna's weakness and isolation can make her the perfect victim or if she can finally break out of her confinement, order her mind, and get some proof that she's not completely insane, becomes the foundation of a suffocating, haunting tale. and absolutely stunning reading ...
The end of the story
Virtuosity, excellence... all human performance has that objective that illuminates the obsession towards perfection. In the objective of the criminal, who plays as God's nemesis as revenge for his journey through the valley of tears, the ultimate goal must be the sum of details, the beginning, the path and the end, all in one so that it ends up thundering. like a sinister and chilling melody.
«I will be dead in three months. Come tell my story. This is the chilling invitation from Sebastian Trapp, renowned mystery novelist, to Nicky Hunter, the professor and expert critic of his work with whom he maintains an epistolary relationship. From the author's mansion in San Francisco, Nicky begins to unravel the story of Trapp's life under the watchful eyes of his enigmatic wife and his eldest daughter.
But Sebastian Trapp is a mystery in himself. And maybe a murderer. Two decades ago, his first wife and his teenage son disappeared; the case was never resolved. Is the master of mystery playing a deadly game? When a body emerges in the garden pond, everyone realizes that the past is not buried, it is waiting.
