The Talented Mr. Ripley

«The Talented Mr. Ripley» (1974) — the third book in the series about the most famous character of the American novelist. A killer «only out of necessity», a gourmet and an aesthetic, polite and quite good-natured, Ripley is nothing like... a banal brute. He lives in a world where fiction and reality are indistinguishable, the boundaries between good and evil are quite conditional, and crime is a game, a chess match, an innocent pastime between playing the harpsichord and gardening; a kind of puzzle, only the «heads» at stake are always real. Like other books in the «ripliad», «The Talented Mr. Ripley» was successful with readers and has been translated into many languages; based on the novel, Wim Wenders made the film «The American Friend» in 1977, in which Dennis Hopper played the role of Ripley, and in 2002, a new film of the same name was released with John Malkovich in the lead role.