Synopses & Reviews
With its sinister humor and genius plotting,
Ripley's Game is an enduring portrait of a compulsive, sociopathic American antihero.
Living on his posh French estate with his elegant heiress wife, Tom Ripley, on the cusp of middle age, is no longer the striving comer of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Having accrued considerable wealth through a long career of crime forgery, extortion, serial murder Ripley still finds his appetite unquenched and longs to get back in the game. In Ripley's Game, first published in 1974, Patricia Highsmith's classic chameleon relishes the opportunity to simultaneously repay an insult and help a friend commit a crime and escape the doldrums of his idyllic retirement. This third novel in Highsmith's series is one of her most psychologically nuanced particularly memorable for its dark, absurd humor and was hailed by critics for its ability to manipulate the tropes of the genre. With the creation of Ripley, one of literature's most seductive sociopaths, Highsmith anticipated the likes of Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter years before their appearance.
Review
"The feeling of menace behind most Highsmith novels...has made readers uneasy. One closes most of her books with the feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had ever imagined." Julian Symons, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith." Time
Review
"An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there's nothing quite like it." Boston Globe
Review
"Highsmith is an exquisitely sardonic etcher of the casually treacherous personality." Newday
Synopsis
Connoisseur of art, harpsichord aficionado, gardener extraordinaire, and genius of improvisational murder, the inimitable Tom Ripley finds his complacency shaken when he is scorned at a posh gala. While an ordinary psychopath might repay the insult with some mild act of retribution, what Ripley has in mind is far more subtle, and infinitely more sinister. A social slight doesn't warrant murder of course — just a chain of events that may lead to it.
Synopsis
With its sinister humor and genius plotting, is an enduring portrait of a compulsive, sociopathic American antihero.
Synopsis
Living on his posh French estate with his elegant heiress wife, Tom Ripley, on the cusp of middle age, is no longer the striving comer of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Having accrued considerable wealth through a long career of crime--forgery, extortion, serial murder--Ripley still finds his appetite unquenched and longs to get back in the game. In Ripley's Game, first published in 1974, Patricia Highsmith's classic chameleon relishes the opportunity to simultaneously repay an insult and help a friend commit a crime--and escape the doldrums of his idyllic retirement. This third novel in Highsmith's series is one of her most psychologically nuanced--particularly memorable for its dark, absurd humor--and was hailed by critics for its ability to manipulate the tropes of the genre. With the creation of Ripley, one of literature's most seductive sociopaths, Highsmith anticipated the likes of Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter years before their appearance.
About the Author
Patricia Highsmith (19211995) published five Ripley novels between 1955 and 1991. Her novels include Strangers on a Train and The Price of Salt. She was born in Ft. Worth, Texas, in 1921. Not until after her death in 1995 did she begin to win considerable literary recognition in her native country. The first publication of one of her short stories in The New Yorker occurred posthumously in 2002.