a book
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith · 2008 · 288 pages
It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.” Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. “Sinister and strangely alluring” (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.
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Tana French
“Tom Ripley, broke and living by his wits, is sent to Italy to convince rich boy Dickie Greenleaf to come home. Instead, he kills Dickie and steals his identity. The book positions us with the murderer, not the investigator. We see the whole train of events through Tom Ripley’s eyes, and we’re seduced into being on his side. Usually the great payoff moment of a mystery book, the one you look forward to, is the moment when the killer is revealed. Highsmith turns that upside down: when Ripley is on the verge of getting caught, you’re on the edge of your seat hoping that he’ll escape, that that big payoff won’t happen.”↗
