About The Book

Elsie Tyler turns heads wherever she goes. After leaving her hometown upstate for Greenwich Village, the charming young waitress soon finds herself surrounded by admirers, including Jack and Natalia Sutherland, a married couple who invite Elsie into their bohemian inner circle and help her launch a career as a model. Meanwhile, Ralph Linderman, a middle-aged security guard with a dog named God, is nursing his own obsession with Elsie. He sets out to protect her from the “bad company” she attracts, but his uninvited affections are overbearing, possibly even pathological. When Ralph finds Jack’s wallet on a morning stroll through the Village and returns it, he is entirely unprepared for the complex maze of sexual obsession and disturbing psychological intrigue he is about to be drawn into.

Originally published in 1986, Found in the Street is classic Highsmith—an engrossing, unsettling thriller that explores the bleakest alleyways of human desire and a kaleidoscopic portrait of 1980s New York City. Highsmith, the author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, has been called “one of the finest crime novelists” by the New York Times and is now considered one of the most original voices in twentieth-century American fiction.

Praise

“[Highsmith’s] characters are irrational, and they leap to life in their very lack of reason . . . Highsmith is the poet of apprehension rather than fear.” —Graham Greene

“Fabulous, in all senses of that word . . . combining the best features of the suspense genre with the best of existential fiction—a thrilled reflection.” —Paul Theroux

“[Found in the Street] is a characteristic drama of interlocking destinies and insidious obsessions; and in Ralph Miss Highsmith has added another memorable portrait to her gallery of near-pathological loners.” —John Gross, The New York Times

“Ms. Highsmith is a fine psychologist and ironist, and [Found in the Street] is a powerfully disturbing, resonant creation.” —Richard Burgin, The New York Times Book Review

“Highsmith paints a dark, frightening picture of the Village and SoHo and its smoky clubs and ominously lit streets, and she weaves well the stories of several characters, as we see Elsie become the object of desire of almost everyone, man and woman alike. And in Jack and Natalia’s conversations about mundane happenings, the author shows her mastery at creating tension more through what isn’t said than what is.” —Andrew Postman, The Washington Post