In the same way that Vince Gilligan made
Breaking Bad's Walter White an awful person that I took a guilty pleasure in rooting for, Highsmith made the detestable Tom Ripley an intriguing character that I hoped would get away with his crimes.
— Mark Frauenfelder - BoingBoing
The brilliance of Highsmith's conception of Tom Ripley was her ability to keep the heroic and demonic American dreamer in balance in the same protagonist—thus keeping us on his side well after his behavior becomes far more sociopathic than that of a con man like Gatsby.
— Frank Rich - New York Times Magazine
[Highsmith] forces us to re-evaluate the lines between reason and madness, normal and abnormal, while goading us into sharing her treacherous hero's point of view.
— Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Mesmerizing...a Ripley novel is not to be safely recommended to the weak-minded or impressionable.
— Washington Post
The most sinister and strangely alluring quintet the crime-fiction genre has ever produced.
— Mark Harris - Entertainment Weekly
[Highsmith] has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger.
— Graham Greene
[Tom Ripley] is as appalling a protagonist as any mystery writer has ever created.
— Newsday
Murder, in Patricia Highsmith's hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic... has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.
— Robert Towers - New York Review of Books
Savage in the way of Rabelais or Swift.
— Joyce Carol Oates - New York Review of Books
For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith.
— Time
Highsmith's subversive touch is in making the reader complicit with Ripley's cold logic.
— Daily Telegraph (UK)
