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This probably isn't going to sound good, but I feel for Tom Ripley. He embodies all my weakest, most petulant, lowest self-esteem moments - when I find myself asking, "Why don't you like me more? Why can't I have what you have? Why can't I take the easy way?" Just...my stuff sucks, give me your stuff.

Nobody likes Tom. No one's ever really even tolerated him. He can't tolerate himself. You root for him not because you like him - you probably don't - but because...there but for the grace. What would you be like, if no one had ever liked you?

"The psychopath," Patricia Highsmith says, "is an average man living more clearly than the world permits him." What makes you root for Ripley is not that he's a bottomless pit of want, but that he proactively tries to fill it. Where we think, "Why can't I have what he's having?" Mr. Ripley sets out to take it. He's ambitious, hard-working, and - in his own way - brave. I hope he gets away with it.

This series goes downhill pretty quickly, and I suggest you don't bother. Here are my reviews of rest of them:
- Ripley Under Ground (4 stars, fine)
- Ripley's Game (3 stars, blah)
- The Boy Who Followed Ripley (2 stars and we're well off the rails here, although the result is accidentally funny)
- Ripley Under Water (1 star, just a dire waste of pages)