Know Your Audience - Action Sequences vs. Internal Conflict - Writing for the Fairer Sex

     I am having an inner conflict of my own as I start my next novel, a ghost story/mystery revolving around my female protagonist's need to find her lighter side again.
     I wrote the first three chapters and typical for a writer have fallen in love with my own voice and word choice. I showed the first chapter to my best friend who loved it and totally identified with the protagonist's frustration with her husband and children. I felt like it showed the state of mind that she was in. However, my writing mentor, a published author, and someone who's opinion I value highly thinks it's too slow and need some action sequences. More show don't tell. Of course, he's probably right. Show don't tell is the mantra for writing. But I feel it changes the tone.
     I am probably just mama bearing over my own vanity and manipulation of the English language. But then I started looking at the book's I read, mysteries and romances and studying the first few pages to see where the action comes in.
     And I noticed a trend. There was a sentence or so that set up a seed of doubt. For instance, in the best seller Girl on a Train, it begins with Rachel being disturbed by clothes lying on the train track and morbidly imagining something bad happened. But then it switches to her introspectively thinking about the people in the houses she passes and her own life. There is little action. In fact, the murder mystery doesn't happen for awhile.
     The wildly popular, Outlander, does the same thing. A paragraph precluding the book about people disappearing and then the opening line about it being a strange place to disappear from before switching to a dawdling narrative of establishing the characters of Claire and her husband with a lot of telling about her life in the war and her living with her uncle.
     I think even Gone Girl teases the reader with the heading "one day gone" before going into the introspective thoughts of a husband and wife who loathe each other. A slow introspection of life.
     So is there a difference to books written more for a female market? No, James Bond skiing down a mountain while being fired at. Or Tom Clancy agent running from Russian spies.
     The last book I read, Hausfrau, a modern Anna Karenina goes off into Jungian philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis while the main character Anna tries to figure out why she's passive and has affairs. It's got very little action except getting on a train and talking about Swiss timetables and the German language vs. Swiss German.
I'd love feedback on this one.
Do I start with a one-two punch or a slower build?