Product Description

The Buckmaster Gallery is staging another Derwatt exhibition, but now an American collector claims that the expensive masterpiece he bought three years ago is a fake. It is, of course, and he wants to talk to Derwatt, but Derwatt, inconveniently, is dead. Ripley needs the perfect solution to keep his role in the fraud a secret and his reputation clean but not everyone's nerves are as steady as his. Especially when it comes to murder...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30290 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

About the Author
Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1921 but moved to New York when she was six. In her senior year she edited the college magazine, having decided to become a writer at the age of sixteen. Her first novel Strangers on a Train was made into a famous film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland in 1995. Her last novel Small g: A Summer Idyll was published posthumously just over a month later

Customer Reviews

Gruesome but gripping
This is a good book but it is perhaps not quite as good as The Talented Mr Ripley. How could it be? All the same, it's a rich, compelling story with great locations.

Ripley is more mature here. He is not the gauche boy he was in the previous book who still had so much to learn. Nor is Ripley the underdog - he has fashioned a nice little life for himself in which he enjoys considerable leisure and luxury.

The means by which Ripley has arrived at his new found wealth are criminal and he must exercise further criminality in order to maintain his lovely life. Murder, impersonation, fantastic lies - Ripley is at it again and he must constantly plot, plan and scheme in order to stay ahead of the law.

All this in a sea of superb writing with Highsmith's characteristic sharpness, pace and attention to detail. This book is different to its predecessor, mostly because Ripley is different and his circumstances have certainly changed. I'm not sure that I understand Ripley any better after this book, but then again, his unusualness is part of his appeal.

Ripley Under Ground
This second Ripley novel sees our 'hero' Tom Ripley settled in France with his wife, Heloise, about 6 years after the Dickie Greenleaf affair in Italy described in The Talented Mr Ripley.

Complicit in a fraud to fake the paintings of the in-fact dead Derwatt, Ripley must take action when the police begin to suspect that the 'new' Derwatts (supposedly painted by the artist while living in seclusion in Mexico) are faked. Donning a fake beard, Ripley makes an appearance as Derwatt at the Buckmaster Gallery in London attracting the attention of a certain American Derwatt collector, Murchison.

Ripley Under Ground revisits the black humour seen first in The Talented Mr Ripley, and begins to develop more fully the complex character of Tom Ripley who now has to contend with combining murder and deceit with his domestic life at 'Belle Ombre'.

Hypnotic suspense
Another adventure with Patricia Highsmith’s lovely character Thomas Ripley. This book follows the author’s “The Talented Mr Ripley” so that the reader is already acquainted with most of the protagonists like Dick and Chris Greenleaf, Bernard Murchisson or Tom’s wife Heloise. When Ed Banbury and Jeff Constant, owners of the Buckmaster Gallery in London, decide to open a new show featuring paintings by the famous Derwatt, the situation becomes uncomfortable when the American collector, Murchisson, claims that a painting he bought three years ago is a fake. Knowing that Derwatt died years ago in Greece and that Bernard had been forging paintings by “Derwatt”, allegedly living in a remote village in Mexico, it will take all of Ripley’s talent to clean the reputation of the Buckmaster Gallery, as Murchisson’s visit to London is imminent. Mrs Highsmith’s highly successful ingredients are all present in this novel: crime, horror, humour and suspense.