American adventurer Tom Ripley made his mesmerising entrance into modern literature in the 1955 The Talented Mr Ripley. By the time of his second appearance, in the 1970 Ripley Under Ground, he has acquired a cool and beautiful French wife, a lovely house in the French countryside and an enviable amount of the leisure that only money can buy. Yet, apart from a passion for Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music, his main concerns have always been the bothersome murders he must commit in order to keep his assumed identity intact. People pop up from his past and have to be eliminated. Others start asking awkward questions and must also be silenced. What's deeply subversive about these brilliant books is that the author, obviously in thrall to her murderous anti-hero, makes the reader just as complicit in his crimes and evasions as she is.