Description
Tom Ripley manipulates an innocent man into murder — for revenge, for sport, for art. Ripley’s Game (1974) — the third Ripliad novel — is Highsmith’s darkest: insulted by a picture-framer, Tom sets out to destroy him — manipulating the dying Jonathan Trevanny into becoming an assassin, then watching the game spiral beyond anyone’s control — a game no one can win.
The moral horror here is profound: Tom corrupts a decent man, almost redeems himself through an unlikely friendship, then pulls back from the brink — or does he? The train murder sequence is among the most terrifying in all crime fiction, and the ending is pure Highsmith ice. Few crime novels cut this deep — or leave such a chill.
Third in the Ripliad — read in order. For thriller readers: the masterpiece of the series, and one of the great crime novels of the century.
Inner Places: The Life of David Milne is James King’s searching biography of one of Canada’s most original painters. David Milne (1882–1953) was a man who gave his life to art on his own uncompromising terms — working in poverty, in isolation, and with a modernist eye that found grandeur in the smallest details of the natural world.
King traces Milne’s journey from his rural Ontario childhood through his restless moves across Canada, New York, and England, always returning to the wilderness that was both his subject and his teacher. Through close readings of the paintings and the journals, letters, and conversations of those who knew him, the biography shows how Milne turned nature into a language of form and feeling.
Far from a conventional life story, Inner Places explores what it costs — and what it means — to live for art alone. Milne refused to chase the market or the fashionable, choosing integrity over comfort again and again.
For readers of Canadian art history, modernism, and lives devoted to a single calling, this is an illuminating portrait of a painter who painted as he lived: quietly, stubbornly, and completely.
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