Hardcover, 272 pages
Spanish language
Published June 6, 1999 by Penguin Books.
It's been six years since Ripley murdered Dickie Greenleaf and inherited his money. Now, in Ripley Under Ground (1970), he lives in a beautiful French villa, surrounded by a world-class art collection and married to a pharmaceutical heiress. All seems serene in Ripley's world until a phone call from London shatters his peace. An art forgery scheme he set up a few years ago is threatening to unravel: a nosy American is asking questions and Ripley must go to London to put a stop to it. In this second Ripley novel, Patricia Highsmith offers a mesmerizing and disturbing tale in which Ripley will stop at nothing to preserve his tangle of lies.
This ends in another cliffhanger, bloody hell!
An amateur art collector raises questions about a possible art-forgery scheme of which Tom Ripley happens to be the mastermind and partial beneficiary. That leaves Mr. Ripley with only one course of action, but his solution gets a little complicated.
This is the second novel in Patricia Highsmith's Ripliad, a series of five novels featuring the casual murderer Tom Ripley. Unfortunately, this novel has a lot of overt explaining in its narrative, which is a no-no for me. Both the back-story at the beginning and Ripley's cover at the end are heavy-handed in this regard. As well, Ripley's wife, Heloise, is a little too thinly presented to make her acceptance of his actions believable.
It's too bad Highsmith made these choices as she has one of the best narrative voices for wide audiences. I often hold her up as an example of what I expect at a minimum from …
An amateur art collector raises questions about a possible art-forgery scheme of which Tom Ripley happens to be the mastermind and partial beneficiary. That leaves Mr. Ripley with only one course of action, but his solution gets a little complicated.
This is the second novel in Patricia Highsmith's Ripliad, a series of five novels featuring the casual murderer Tom Ripley. Unfortunately, this novel has a lot of overt explaining in its narrative, which is a no-no for me. Both the back-story at the beginning and Ripley's cover at the end are heavy-handed in this regard. As well, Ripley's wife, Heloise, is a little too thinly presented to make her acceptance of his actions believable.
It's too bad Highsmith made these choices as she has one of the best narrative voices for wide audiences. I often hold her up as an example of what I expect at a minimum from a decent writer.
For those who do decide to read Highsmith's Tom Ripley novels, read this one before Ripley Under Water, as that one is a sequel-of-sorts to this one.
I not sure I liked the ending. but it works
