3 March 2026

I've never wanted to root for a liar this much, and that's entirely by design. Patricia Highsmith writes Tom Ripley as someone you should not like — grasping, dishonest, dangerous — and somehow makes you complicit in hoping he gets away with it anyway. The setup sends Ripley to Italy under false pretenses, into a life of wealth and ease that isn't his, and the tension comes less from whodunit than from watching how far someone will go to keep something they were never entitled to. This is one of the best psychological thriller books for anyone interested in character over plot mechanics; Highsmith is less concerned with twists than with the slow, queasy experience of being inside the head of someone whose moral compass is quietly broken. Read this when you want something atmospheric and a little sun-drenched, since so much of it takes place along the Italian coast, all villas and cafes and a very specific kind of postwar glamour. I'd recommend it to readers who like antihero-driven stories and want to see where a lot of that modern fascination with charming, dangerous men actually started. It's shorter and tighter than you'd expect from how much it's influenced since, and Highsmith's prose has a coolness to it that makes the discomfort creep up on you rather than announce itself. Read it slowly enough to notice how carefully she builds Ripley's justifications; that's the real horror of the book, how reasonable he sounds to himself.