SOURCE: "Mellow at the Last," in Guardian Weekly, Vol. 152, No. 12, March 19, 1995, p. 29.

In the following positive review of Small g: A Summer Idyll, Elborn states that the work "has a serenity rarely found in Highsmith's world."

No other crime writer came near to possessing Patricia Highsmith's particular gift. Highsmith, who died last month, had an ability to stretch the nerves by teasing out the tension of some trivial domestic incident, or to describe suffocation by a cluster of snails, was entirely her own. Small g: A Summer Idyll is unlike any of her previous books, but from the first page, it is recognisably authentic Highsmith. Perhaps approaching her lesbian novel Carol in tenderness and theme, it has a serenity rarely found in Highsmith's world.

This does not mean that the novel is in any way soft. No story that opens with a vicious fatal stabbing by two drug-crazed...