Patricia Highsmith

When Ray Garrett's new bride commits suicide, his father-in-law, Ed Coleman, believes it must be murder, and is determined to track down Ray and kill him

Those who Walk Away

I craved some Venice and it delivered the vibe. The plot was so . . . boring? Unimportant? Everything else was very TV/entertainment quality which just never feels good to me. The consume. Expected more from Highsmith.

martian1138

Isabella Agostino

I love Gore Vidal, so I took his quote on the cover very seriously. Also, Patricia Highsmith is from my town in Texas, so seeing this in a used bookstore in Venice, Italy felt like coming home. The story moved slowly, but there was always the right amount of tension between Ray and Coleman. The things that I couldn’t quite grasp were character motives. Every encounter with a new chapter felt like coming to school on the second day and missing the introductions of the first. Maybe feeling left out of Ray and Coleman’s full thought process was just one thread of the palpable tension, but maybe not. What seemed to be meant as a cliffhanger ending struck me more as anticlimactic. So be it. I nonetheless enjoyed the read, mostly because of its vivid portrayal of Venice and its islands.