Review by Booklist Review
/*STARRED REVIEW*/ After a 12-year absence, Highsmith's Tom Ripley returns. There are no other series' heroes quite like Ripley, a sociopath who appreciates culture and thinks nothing of murder for art's sake. In effortless, measured, graceful prose, Highsmith glides her narrative from the French countryside, where Ripley--now married--has settled into an ordered, outwardly idyllic existence, through Morocco, Paris, London, and back to the country. Ripley seems to have forsaken his bloodstained past until he finds himself stalked by a man intent on bringing all the skeletons in the Ripley closet to light. As in the four previous Ripley novels, Highsmith gently nudges the reader into a world where all our shared moral assumptions are ever so slightly moved out of alignment. Ripley is certainly no Hannibal the Cannibal, but while his insinuating brand of evil is less shocking, it is no less disturbing. Highsmith plays brilliantly on her readers' everyday fears, taking what looks like slightly improper behavior from one angle and making from it a very special and very chilling kind of deviant behavior. Highsmith is once again our unfaltering guide through these ambiguous nether regions of good and evil. (Reviewed Sept. 1, 1992)0679416773Peter Robertson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With the chilling, knife-edged subtlety that is her trademark, Highsmith ( Strangers on a Train ; Ripley's Game ) details the civilized life pursued by her sociopath hero Tom Ripley, who here makes his fifth appearance and his first in a dozen years. Now living in the French countryside with his wife, Heloise, Ripley is bothered by an obnoxious American couple who have rented a house nearby and who seem bent on exploring incidents in Ripley's past. With no apparent personal motive, David Pritchard and his wife Janice refer to an American art dealer named Murchison who mysteriously disappeared some years ago after visiting Ripley. Ripley, who had murdered Murchison to prevent the exposure of an art forgery scheme and then dumped his body in a nearby canal, grows increasingly anxious and angry as Pritchard continues to harass him and begins dredging the local canals. Highsmith leads up to her resolution as unsensationally and evenhandedly as she describes Ripley's ordinary days spent tending his dahlias, practicing Schubert on the harpsichord, relishing his meals and looking out tenderly for Heloise and their housekeeper. The perfect gentleman, he is civil, considerate, utterly well mannered--and deadly. Highsmith will make readers look closer at their neighbors, and at themselves. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Not many mysteries feature a murderer as a protagonist, but Highsmith's popular series featuring the cultivated psychopath Tom Ripley (e.g., The Talented Mr. Ripley, Audio Reviews, LJ 4/1/91) is an exception. In this sortie, Ripley is quietly enjoying his lovely home in the French countryside when it appears his past may be catching up with him. He receives a phone call ostensibly from someone he knows he murdered; and then there are those creepy new neighbors who have ties to some of Ripley's enemies. Well written and charming, this unabridged audiobook is likely to please public library patrons. One caveat: since this is a British production, narrator Geoffrey Matthews must spend much time affecting American accents for Ripley and his nemesis, which may turn off some listeners.-Reilly Reagan, Putnam Cty. Lib., Cookeville, Tenn. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Tom Ripley, the charming, resourceful swindler/killer who's survived four earlier tales of skullduggery, provides just the antidote for the recent glum misogyny of seminal psychological- suspenser Highsmith's recent work. Tom's idyllic retreat to the French countryside with his perfect wife Héloïse is spoiled by a pair of intrusive new neighbors, David and Janice Pritchard, who seem bent not only on disturbing his privacy--they have no trouble obtaining his unlisted phone number--but on persecuting him with dark hints about his earlier felonies. One of them, Tom's convinced, is the caller who identified himself as Dickie Greenleaf (Tom's first victim, from The Talented Mr. Ripley), and Pritchard not only shows up to photograph Tom's house but announces that he's been making inquiries about the late art-collector Murchison, whom Tom killed when he threatened to expose the Derwatt forgery scheme in Ripley Under Ground and whose corpse has been resting for years at the bottom of a neighborhood canal. When Pritchard turns up in Tangiers, hot on the trail of the vacationing Ripleys, Tom decides, after a typically inconclusive confrontation with his self-ordained nemesis, that he'd better cut short his trip to confer with his fellow Derwatt conspirators in London; and when Pritchard, with his wife's amused knowledge, moves from phoning Murchison's widow in the States to dragging the canals, Tom calls on Derwatt veteran Ed Banbury for help, not knowing how unexpectedly his plan will backfire. If Tom isn't as inventive as in his earlier outings, he's just as believably amoral, and no one rivals Highsmith's ability to mix apprehension--most of this novel lours like a storm cloud--with staring surprise. It's been 12 long years since The Boy Who Followed Ripley: welcome back, Tom.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
