Patricia Highsmith is unafraid to admit that human beings can have really uncharitable thoughts. But here is a love story and she illuminates the way a person can fall in love, and how this can change a life (or two). The suspense that builds steadily and urgently is about the exquisite longing one person feels for another---and then it becomes about whether this particular love can survive. In 1950s New York City a woman falling for a woman was considered fairly impossible.

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