The Bad Girls Book Club

Two of the new year’s most anticipated thrillers arrive on a giant wave of publicity (including presold film rights). But do they both deserve the hype?

- Leah Greenblatt

The blockbuster Girls of fiction have become so familiar by now that naming them sounds like an incantation, or a game card from Clue (Gone……on the Train …With the Dragon Tattoo!). Like most literary trends—Jane Austen zombies, adult coloring books—their influence will fade eventually. But until then every novel with a knife-edged plot and an unreliable female narrator bears the burden and gift of association—including two that land this month with the full force of the Girl Industrial Complex behind them: A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window and Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen’s The Wife Between Us.