Robert Forester didn't look like the kind of man to be a prowler. His ex-wife had told the police he was erratic, liable to violence, had even fired a gun at her. Maybe he was a psychopathic murderer...

Since his debut in 1955, Tom Ripley has evolved into the ultimate bad boy sociopath, influencing countless novelists and filmmakers. In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a "sissy" by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness turns obsessive when Ripley is sent to Italy to bring back his libertine pal but grows enraged by Dickie's ambivalent feelings for Marge, a charming American dilettante. A dark reworking of Henry James's The Ambassadors, The Talented Mr. Ripley—is up to his tricks in a 90s film and also Rene Clement's 60s film, "Purple Noon."

New York Times Book Review • Editors' ChoiceExcerpted in The New YorkerProfiled in The Los Angeles TimesPublishing for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith's diaries "offer the most complete picture ever published" of the canonical author (New York Times).Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia Highsmith is now recognized as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Beloved by fans who were unaware of the real psychological turmoil behind her prose, the famously secretive Highsmith refused to authorize a biography, instead sequestering herself in her Switzerland home in her final years. Posthumously, her devoted editor Anna von Planta discovered her diaries and notebooks in 1995, tucked in a closet—with tantalizing instructions to be read.For years thereafter, von Planta meticulously culled from over eight thousand pages to help reveal the inscrutable figure...

In This Sweet Sickness, Patricia Highsmith, in her own inimitable fashion, has created a complex psychological tale as suspenseful as The Talented Mr. Ripley. David Kelsey, a young scientist, has an unyielding conviction that life will turn out all right for him; he just has to fix the Situation: he is in love with a married woman. Obsessed with Annabelle and the life he has imagined for them—including the fully furnished cabin he maintains for her—David prepares to win her over, whatever it takes. In this riveting tale of a deluded loner, Highsmith reveals her uncanny ability to draw out the secret obsessions that overwhelm the human heart.

Nowhere is Patricia Highsmith's affinity for animals more apparent than in The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder, for here she transfers the murderous thoughts and rages most associated with humans onto the animals themselves. You will meet, for example, in "In the Dead of Truffle Season," a truffle-hunting pig who tries to whet his own appetite for a while; or Jumbo in "Chorus Girl's Absolutely Final Performance," a lonely, old circus elephant who decides she's had enough of show business and cruel trainers for one lifetime. In this satirical reprise of Kafka, cats, dogs, and breeding rodents are no longer ordinary beings in the happy home, but actually have the power to destroy the world in which we live.

The great revival of interest in Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of this novel that will give dog owners nightmares for years to come. With an eerie simplicity of style, Highsmith turns our next-door neighbors into sadistic psychopaths, lying in wait among white picket fences and manicured lawns. In A Dog's Ransom, Highsmith blends a savage humor with brilliant social satire in this dark tale of a highminded criminal who hits a wealthy Manhattan couple where it hurts the most when he kidnaps their beloved poodle. This work attesets to Highsmith's reputation as "the poet of apprehension" (Graham Greene).

Three of them are waiting. Rydal Keener is waiting for something exciting to happen in his grubby little Athens hotel. At forty-odd, Chester MacFarland has been waiting much longer, expecting his life of stock manipu­lation and fraud to catch up with him. And Colette, Chester's wife, is waiting for something altogether different. After a nasty little incident in the hotel, they all wait together. As the stakes, and the tension, in their three-cornered waiting game mount, they learn that while passports and silence can be bought, other things can cost as much as your life.

'Nothing That Meets the Eye' confirms Patricia Highsmith as a great American writer. If only Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) had been alive to see the thunderous critical response to the publication of the best-selling 'The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith' in 2001. Now the Highsmith renaissance continues with this brilliant collection of 28 short stories, a great majority of which have never been seen before. The stories assembled in 'Nothing That Meets the Eye', written between 1938 and 1982, are vintage Highsmith: a gigolo-like psychopath preys on unfulfilled career women; a lonely spinster's fragile hold on reality is tethered to the bottle; an estranged postal worker invents homicidal fantasies about his coworkers. While some stories anticipate the diabolical narratives of the Ripley novels, others possess a Capra-like sweetness that forces us to see the author in a new light. From this new collection, a remarkable portrait of the American psyche at mid-century emerges, unforgettably distilled by the inimitable eye of Patricia Highsmith. Patricia Highsmith is the author of such classics as 'Strangers on a Train' and 'The Talented Mr. Ripley'. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, she died in 1995 in Locarno, Switzerland.

This is a collection of unsettling tales by Patricia Highsmith.

Under the hot desert sun nothing is quite as it seems. Howard Ingham, an American writer, is sent to Tunisia to gather material for a movie, a love story too sordid to be set in America. But his director fails to arrive as scheduled and the erratic mails bring news of infidelities and suicide. Ingham, for reasons obscure even to himself, decides to stay on and work instead on a novel. Gradually, however, a series of peculiar events, a hushed-up murder, a vanished corpse, and secret broadcasts to the Soviet Union, lures him inexorably into the deep, ambivalent shadows of this Arab town; into deceit and away from conventional morality. And when Ingham finds an accomplice to murder, or perhaps something more, what is in question is not justice or truth, but the state of his oddly quiet conscience.

Ramón mends furniture. Theodore paints. A devout Catholic, Ramón lives in Mexico City, not far from where he was born into poverty. Theodore, a rich German transplanted to a country where money buys some comfort but no peace, believes in nothing at all. You'd think the two had nothing in common. Except, of course, that both had slept with Lelia. The two were good friends, so neither minded sharing her affections. They did mind, however, when Lelia was found raped, murdered, and horribly mutilated. The two friends, suspects both, twist in a limbo of tension and doubt, each seeking his own form of solace and truth.

The world of Patricia Highsmith has always been filled with ordinary people, all of whom are capable of very ordinary crimes. This theme was present from the beginning, when her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, galvanized the reading public. Here we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. “Some people are better off dead,” Bruno remarks, “like your wife and my father, for instance.” As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, anybody is capable of murder. The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith on a prolific career of noir fiction, proving her a master at depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday contemporary life.

Tom Ripley is settled into his estate in the French countryside, quietly enjoying his gardening and planning a trip to North Africa with his beautiful wife. But an odd, vulgar American couple is lurking about the village—and they seem to recognize him. After a string of strange coincidences, Ripley must deploy all of his cruel talents to protect himself and hide a deed from his past. Ripley Under Water (1991) is Patricia Highsmith's final Ripley novel, and one of her most deliciously thrilling and terrifying.