Synopses & Reviews
"Illuminating and always compelling," wrote the
New York Times when
Those Who Walk Away was originally published in 1967. Yet again, as the
New Yorker reported in 1987, "Highsmith keeps moving, darting in and out of our field of vision, making afterimages that will tremble but stay in our minds."
The honeymoon is over, as they say, the bride dead by her own hand. Ray Garrett, the grieving husband, convinces the police in Rome of his innocence, but not his thuggish father-in-law, an American painter named Ed Coleman, who shoots him at point-blank range and leaves him for dead. Ray survives, however, and follows Coleman to Venice, where the two fall into an eerie game of cat-and-mouse Coleman obsessed with vengeance and Ray equally insistent on clearing his conscience, though each is at once the hunter and the hunted in a duel composed of tension, hiding, and guessing, and at times punctuated by violence that, even as each manages to walk away, draws them nearer to death.
Ray and Coleman, according to Julian Symons, "are among the most memorable products of Highsmith's powerful imagination."
Synopsis
The honeymoon is over, and the bride is dead. The grieving husband convinces the police in Rome of his innocence, but has no such luck with his father-in-law, who shoots him at point-blank range and leaves him for dead.
Synopsis
The honeymoon is over, as they say, the bride dead by her own hand. Ray Garrett, the grieving husband, convinces the police in Rome of his innocence, but not his thuggish father-in-law, an American painter named Ed Coleman, who shoots him at point-blank range and leaves him for dead. Ray survives, however, and follows Coleman to Venice, where the two fall into an eerie game of cat-and-mouse—Coleman obsessed with vengeance and Ray equally insistent on clearing his conscience, though each is at once the hunter and the hunted in a duel composed of tension, hiding, and guessing, and at times punctuated by violence that, even as each manages to walk away, draws them nearer to death.