I wasn’t really quite sure what to expect of this book and I’m not sure what to say of it except that I enjoyed it a lot.

I know the story is very well known thanks to the Hitchcock film, but I’ve never seen it and I only knew of the premise that two strangers meet on, surprise, a train and agree to swap murders, each person killing the others enemy. In fact that isn’t quite the premise so I had all my preconceptions wrong right from the start.

The suspense is the excellent sort where most everyone behaves perfectly reasonably, thinks perfectly sensible thoughts and yet everything still gets tangled up badly and though you find yourself wanting to knock the characters heads together to sort everything out you know it can’t happen. Vary well done indeed. I’m not saying anything new here either as Highsmith is a well know master of the suspense genre.

I suppose what I’d conclude is that this is reknowned to be one of the best suspense books there is, and that the reknown is correctly placed as far as I’m concerned.