Reviewed by Isabella Agostino

⋆⋆⋆

I love Gore Vidal, so I took his quote on the cover of my edition very seriously.

Also, Patricia Highsmith is from my town in Texas, so finding this in a used bookstore in Venice, Italy, felt like coming home.

The story moved slowly, but there was always the right amount of tension between Ray and Coleman. I couldn’t quite grasp the characters’ motives. Every encounter with a new chapter felt like arriving at school on the second day and missing the introductions from the first.

Maybe feeling left out of Ray and Coleman’s full thought process was just one thread of the palpable tension, but maybe not. What seemed to be meant as a cliffhanger ending struck me more as anticlimactic. So be it. I nonetheless enjoyed the read, mostly because of its vivid portrayal of Venice and its islands.