[2][3] Dr. Anna Fox suffers from agoraphobia due to a traumatic car accident and lives a reclusive life at her large home in New York City.

There is Ethan, the reserved and polite teenage son; Alistair, the controlling father; and Jane, a friendly woman with whom Anna shares many interests.

A detective confronts her with the tragic truth: Her husband and daughter died in the car accident that triggered her agoraphobia, and she has been imagining her conversations with them.

He reveals that he was the one who killed Katie because of his resentment about the abuse and neglect he faced as a child under her care, and that his father knew, but kept it a secret to protect Jane.

[5] In a review in the New Yorker, Joyce Carol Oates called it "a superior example of a subset of recent thrillers featuring 'unreliable' female protagonists who, despite their considerable handicaps [...] manage to persevere and solve mysteries where others have failed" and says the lead character "ultimately seems more a function of the plot than a fully realized person, not quite as interesting as her problems".

[6] Janet Maslin in The New York Times said, "A book that's as devious as this novel will delight anyone who's been disappointed too often" and that the it holds up "pretty well, but there are problems" with writing that "is serviceable, sometimes bordering on strange.

[10] A Netflix film based on the novel directed by Joe Wright, with a screenplay by Tracy Letts and starring Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Anthony Mackie, Fred Hechinger, Wyatt Russell, Brian Tyree Henry, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Julianne Moore was released on May 14, 2021.

Five days after the article's publication, The Times reviewed original outlines of The Woman in the Window, which were said to have been sent by Mallory to his literary agent at ICM, dated September 20, 2015 and October 4, 2015.

The Times concluded that "Some of the overlapping plot points, including the fact that both protagonists were fighting with their husbands about infidelity before the car crashes, and that the psychopathic teenager tortured animals, while not in the original outline, were contained in the October version".

In a follow-up piece, the New York Times quoted Harvard copyright law expert Rebecca Tushnet who explained that there are many "well-worn tropes in thrillers," and Stuart Karle of Columbia Journalism School who stated that "great fiction builds on prior works in terms of both language and sense of place.