Best Psychological Thriller Books

Tom Ripley has settled into comfortable French country life at his villa Belle Ombre with his wealthy wife Héloïse. He is co-managing a scheme to sell forged paintings attributed to a dead artist named Derwatt. When an American collector arrives convinced the paintings are fraudulent, Ripley must manage the situation — which escalates, as Ripley situations always do. The second Ripley novel, fifteen years after The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Edith Howland keeps a diary. In it, her son Cliffie is successful, married, fulfilling his potential. In reality, Cliffie is a parasitic failure who has moved back into her house and contributes nothing. Her husband has left her. Her diary diverges from reality and then departs from it altogether — becoming not delusion but an act of private creation, a novel within the novel. Highsmith's most feminist work and one of her most devastating.

Walter Stackhouse reads in the newspaper about the case of Melchior Kimmel, a bookseller accused of staging his wife's death as a bus accident. Walter, trapped in his own unhappy marriage, becomes obsessed with Kimmel's method. When his wife subsequently dies in similar circumstances, Kimmel turns the tables — he begins investigating Walter with the intensity of someone who recognises a mirror image.

Philip Carter serves six years in an American federal prison for a crime he didn't commit — a financial conspiracy his employer framed him for. He comes out changed: harder, drug-dependent, capable of violence in ways he wasn't before. A novel about what prison does to a person and what happens when that person returns to a life that has changed without him.

Howard Ingham, an American writer, has come to Tunisia to work on a screenplay. His fiancée doesn't arrive. A colleague dies ambiguously. One night Ingham may have killed an intruder with a typewriter. He isn't certain. Set almost entirely in Hammamet, Tunisia, this is Highsmith's most existential novel — the question of whether Ingham committed a crime becomes less important than the question of whether it matters to him that he might have.

Athens, 1960s. Rydal Keener, a young American drifting through Greece on his father's money, encounters Chester MacFarland — a small-time con man on the run with his wife Colette. When Chester accidentally kills a man and Rydal witnesses it, the two become fatally linked. A thriller set across Greek landscapes — Athens, Crete, Istanbul — exploring the father-son dynamic between two men who are drawn to each other and threatening to each other.

David Kelsey maintains a double life: during the week he lives in a boarding house and works as a chemist; on weekends he retreats to a house he has secretly bought and furnished for a woman named Annabelle — who doesn't love him and has married someone else. A study in erotic obsession so complete that the obsessive has replaced reality with a private fiction. One of Highsmith's most psychologically acute portraits of a particular masculine pathology.

A sixteen-year-old American boy, Frank Pierson, appears at Tom Ripley's door in France claiming to have pushed his wheelchair-bound millionaire father off a cliff. Ripley, intrigued, takes the boy under his wing and accompanies him to Berlin — where they attend transvestite clubs in West Berlin, encounter kidnappers, and where Ripley must decide how much he cares about what happens to this strange, guilty young man.

Robert Forester has been watching a young woman, Jenny, through her kitchen window each evening — not prurient but drawn to the warmth of her domestic life, which contrasts with his disintegrating own. When Jenny discovers him, she is not frightened — she is fascinated. The novel spirals into false accusation, murder, and the complete unravelling of social reality as everyone around Robert becomes convinced he is responsible for things he didn't do.

Ray Garrett's wife has died — a probable suicide — and her father, Ed Coleman, blames Ray and has tried to shoot him in Rome. The novel follows the two men as they circle each other through Venice and its islands — Coleman hunting Ray, Ray unable to leave, drawn back to a man who wants to kill him in a city that seems to conspire with grief.

The fifth and final Ripley novel. An American couple, David and Janice Pritchard, move to the village near Ripley's Belle Ombre and begin investigating the disappearance of Dickie Greenleaf — whose killing, thirty years earlier, is the foundational crime of the entire series. Ripley must manage this threat with the same composure he has brought to every crisis, in a novel that is both a thriller and a late meditation on how long a constructed life can hold.