Found in the Street
(Libby/OverDrive eBook, Kindle)

Beautiful Elsie Taylor, Greenwich Village waitress and model, is the object of desire wherever she goes: men want her, women want her. Then she turns up dead. Whose obsession/resentment got the best of him or her, leading to murder? Highsmith's nineteenth psychological thriller shows meticulous but not cumbersome scene setting as Elsie and the people who know and are fascinated by her all descend into the maelstrom that results in her death. Despite her sometimes awkward, never particularly polished prose, Highsmith is a master at inexorably pulling the reader deeper and deeper into the darkness of her characters' minds. Her most famous novel is probably her first, Strangers on a Train (1950). BH. [OCLC] 87-15287

Highsmith is best known for Strangers On a Train, basis for the prizewinning Hitchcock film, one of her 19 eerie novels. The new one pulses with the beat of Greenwich Village where chance brings ill-assorted people together. Ralph Linderman, a middle-aged security guard, finds a wallet and takes it to its owner, artist Jack Sutherland who lives nearby with his wife Natalia and their small daughter. Meeting young Elsie Tyler, a waitress, Jack learns that Ralph harasses her continually, warning her away from ``bad company.'' The girl's vivid beauty attracts Jack and bisexual Natalia, who team up with their bohemian friends and create a modeling career for Elsie, practically overnight. Trouble develops both from Ralph and from the girl's lesbian lovers, along with several curiously unrelated incidents that leave the reader vaguely unsatisfied. The story's intoxicating flavor and promise beg for a sounder structure than the ambiguous ending provides. (October 28) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Highsmith is best-known as a mystery writer. This novel is being presented as serious literature, but it's simply a psychological suspense thriller that sorely needs the conventional surprise ending. Although the author creates a compelling semi-villain (a snoopy, dotty old security guard) and builds a tense atmosphere, she lets the suspense fall flat after the climactic murder. The protagonists, a Greenwich Village couple who pride themselves on their sophistication and open marriage, come off as stagey and tedious as each falls into a sexually tinged friendship with a young lesbian. Both try to pin her subsequent murder on the snooper; subliminally they blame each other. With a bit less pretension this could have been a good mysteryand what's wrong with that? Joyce Smothers, Monmouth Cty Lib., Manalapan, N.J. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Highsmith (Strangers on a Train), a pioneer of the psychopathology thriller, is to some extent responsible for the high level of craft at work in that genre today. So it's a bit ironic that her new novel--an initially intriguing but ultimately thin and unconvincing study in sexual obsession--is made disappointing by contrast with the powerful work of such second-generation practitioners as Ruth Rendell. Set in NYC's Greenwich Village/Soho, the book focuses on two men's very different preoccupations with beautiful, angelically blond Elsie, a would-be model/actress newly arrived in the city and working as a Village waitress. Middle-aged security guard Ralph Linderman--deserted by his wife, sexually repressed, wildly moralistic yet quirkily anti-religious--sees Elsie as the embodiment of sweet innocence; he follows her around, warning her against big-city sin. Meanwhile, Elsie meets Jack and Natalia Sutherland, a glamorous 30-ish couple (he's an artist, she's an art dealer) who introduce the young stunner to their glitzy friends, helping her get started as a model; Jack is drawn to Elsie in a romantic, esthetic, non-sexual way, but he suspects that Natalia is sliding into an affair with Elsie (whose sex-life is primarily lesbian). Ralph, misunderstanding Jack's interest in Elsie, is soon eavesdropping, haranguing, and harassing. But the violence here, when it eventually comes, emerges arbitrarily from left. field, leaving the two men to feud pointlessly in the anticlimactic final chapters. The portrait of the Sutherland marriage, with trendy art-world backgrounds, is effectively ambiguous and creepily convincing. Crazy coot Ralph, however, is an overly familiar psycho, type, especially in comparison to Rendell's deranged loners. And despite the long, slow buildup, there's no payoff. Sporadically engrossing, then, but largely unsatisfying. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Highsmith is best-known as a mystery writer. This novel is being presented as serious literature, but it's simply a psychological suspense thriller that sorely needs the conventional surprise ending. Although the author creates a compelling semi-villain (a snoopy, dotty old security guard) and builds a tense atmosphere, she lets the suspense fall flat after the climactic murder. The protagonists, a Greenwich Village couple who pride themselves on their sophistication and open marriage, come off as stagey and tedious as each falls into a sexually tinged friendship with a young lesbian. Both try to pin her subsequent murder on the snooper; subliminally they blame each other. With a bit less pretension this could have been a good mysteryand what's wrong with that? Joyce Smothers, Monmouth Cty Lib., Manalapan, N.J. Copyright 1987 Cahners Business Information.

Highsmith is best known for Strangers On a Train, basis for the prizewinning Hitchcock film, one of her 19 eerie novels. The new one pulses with the beat of Greenwich Village where chance brings ill-assorted people together. Ralph Linderman, a middle-aged security guard, finds a wallet and takes it to its owner, artist Jack Sutherland who lives nearby with his wife Natalia and their small daughter. Meeting young Elsie Tyler, a waitress, Jack learns that Ralph harasses her continually, warning her away from ``bad company.'' The girl's vivid beauty attracts Jack and bisexual Natalia, who team up with their bohemian friends and create a modeling career for Elsie, practically overnight. Trouble develops both from Ralph and from the girl's lesbian lovers, along with several curiously unrelated incidents that leave the reader vaguely unsatisfied. The story's intoxicating flavor and promise beg for a sounder structure than the ambiguous ending provides. (October 28) Copyright 1987 Cahners Business Information.