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.
A young man is found dead on a houseboat in London. Three women — each damaged, each with a connection to the dead man — become suspects in an investigation that reaches back through years of loss and resentment.
A picnic in the Chilterns is interrupted when a hot-air balloon accident brings two strangers together. One of them — Joe Rose, a science journalist — becomes the obsessive focus of the other's deranged love. McEwan's clinical thriller dissects the boundary between reason and madness.
The origin story of Hannibal Lecter: from his aristocratic Lithuanian childhood through the traumatic events of the Second World War that broke something fundamental, to the first murders in post-war Europe and Japan. A prequel that traces the specific losses and grievances that created the most celebrated fictional cannibal.
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.
A Cambridge group therapist becomes obsessed with a charismatic Greek Tragedy professor she suspects of murder, convinced he is connected to the ritualistic killings of young women who belong to his secret society — The Maidens.
When a single mother turns up dead in a small English town's river — a place with a dark history of women's deaths — her sister arrives to investigate and care for the dead woman's teenage daughter, uncovering secrets that implicate almost everyone.
