A TALENT FOR MURDER

Swanson’s take on Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley adds a few unnerving twists of its own.

Though they’ve been married for nearly a year, librarian Martha Ratliff doesn’t feel that she knows her husband, traveling salesman Alan Peralta, all that well, and the careful smile she spots him rehearsing for her as he returns from his latest trip, where art teacher Josie Nixon reportedly threw herself from her sixth-floor hotel balcony, makes her wonder what he’s doing on all those trips besides selling novelty merchandise to schoolteachers at conferences. Tracking his recent itinerary, she’s alarmed to place him in five different cities where five different women have been killed, all while he just happened to be passing through. Overwhelmed by her unwelcome discoveries, Martha reaches out to Lily Kintner, an old friend from graduate school with a shadowy past. The two haven’t seen each other for years, but their meeting at a bar halfway between Martha’s home in New Hampshire and Lily’s in Connecticut leads them quickly to a bold plan of action: Lily, whom Alan has never met, will insinuate herself into the next conference on his list, shadow him, and see what he gets up to. To her astonishment, Lily realizes that she isn’t the only person following Alan—a discovery that forges distinctly new links to Highsmith’s classic study of an upwardly mobile sociopath and hurtles this take into hyperdrive.

Nothing here is remotely plausible, but readers who value genuine thrills over documentary realism won’t care a bit.