Highsmith, Patricia - Small g A Summer Idyll (Norton, 2005)

"Like Ripley, [Highsmith's characters] burn in a reader's memory."—Susan Salters Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review

In unmistakable Highsmithian fashion, Small g , Patricia Highsmith's final novel, opens near a seedy Zurich bar with the brutal murder of Petey Ritter. Unraveling the vagaries of love, sexuality, jealousy, and death, Highsmith weaves a mystery both hilarious and astonishing, a classic fairy tale executed with a characteristic penchant for darkness. Published in paperback for the first time in America, Small g is at once an exorcism of Highsmith's literary demons and a revelatory capstone to a wholly remarkable career. It is a delightfully incantatory work that, in the tradition of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream , shows us how bizarre and unpredictable love can be.