Ripley's Game

One of Tom’s more unsavoury associates, Reeves Minot, needs a favour: ‘two simple murders and perhaps one theft’. Tom is unwilling to get his own hands dirty, but finds himself thinking of an English neighbour of his called Jonathan Trevanny, who was rude to him at a party. Out of malice, Tom suggests that since Trevanny is dying of leukaemia and has a family to support, he might carry out the murders. Much to Tom’s surprise, Trevanny agrees. He becomes Tom’s apprentice on a mission that will lead them both from Fontainebleau to a deadly assignation in Munich. In tracing the gradual corruption of a respectable man, Patricia Highsmith leaves the reader wondering whether any one of us, if the circumstances conspired, could become a Ripley.