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Ripley Under Ground
416 pages
A chillingly elegant psychological thriller that traps you inside the mind of a sociopath desperately trying to keep his perfectly curated life from unraveling.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like sipping a perfectly chilled martini while watching a slow-motion car crash. The experience is defined by a creeping, elegant dread that contrasts sharply with the sun-drenched beauty of the French countryside. Highsmith traps you inside a chillingly pragmatic mind, forcing you to experience the suffocating anxiety of a carefully constructed lie beginning to fray. The pacing is steady and methodical, building tension not through action, but through the agonizing, logistical nightmare of covering up a crime. It is a deeply unsettling read that somehow makes you complicit, delighting readers who crave sophisticated psychological suspense and the dark thrill of rooting for a monster who just wants to be left alone with his art collection.
- Mood
- elegant
- dread-soaked
- claustrophobic
- anxious
- Tone
- detached
- amoral
- pragmatic
- sophisticated
- wry
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the burden of a facade · the banality of evil · identity and forgery · the corrupting power of comfort
- The writing
- The prose is chillingly precise and unadorned, treating horrific acts of violence with the same flat, pragmatic attention to detail as the mixing of a martini.
- The arc
- The reader is lulled into a false sense of luxurious security before being dragged through a paranoid, claustrophobic scramble to maintain a deadly illusion.
- Who it's for
- Readers who delight in the slow-burn anxiety of psychological suspense and do not mind rooting for a charming, utterly remorseless monster.
Content notes
- murder
- psychological manipulation
- gaslighting
- corpse disposal
About the book
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.
Description from Open Library.
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