In 1950, Highsmith published Strangers on a Train, a novel from which Alfred Hitchcock adapted his famous film. The Talented Mr. Ripley is Highsmith's fourth published novel, and the first of a series of novels featuring Tom Ripley: Ripley Underground (1970), Ripley's Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), and Ripley Under Water (1990). As The Talented Mr. Ripley ends with Tom looking over his shoulder for policemen, and then to the taxi driver, indicating that Tom's journey is to continue, so do the subsequent novels follow Tom's perpetual struggles. Harrison writes that the central thread of the later Ripley novels is "domesticity," for Ripley weds Heloise (a character absent from this first work), obtains and retains a servant, Madame Annette, and his home, Belle Ombre. But the domesticity of these later Ripley novels is far different from the "domestic" realm of Mongibello, where Dickie, Marge, and Tom cohabit and...