In 1964, the eccentric American novelist Patricia Highsmith is hiding out in a cottage in Suffolk, England, to concentrate on her writing and escape her fans. She has another motive too, ―a secret romance with a married lover based in London.Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear that all her demons have come with her. Prowlers, sexual obsessives, frauds, impostors, suicides, and murderers: the tropes of her fictions clamor for her attention, rudely intruding on her peaceful Suffolk retreat. After the arrival of Ginny, an enigmatic young journalist bent on interviewing her, events take a catastrophic turn. Except, as always in Highsmith’s troubled life, matters are not quite as they first appear . . .Masterfully re-creating Highsmith’s much exercised fantasies of murder and madness, in The Crime Writer Jill Dawson probes the darkest reaches of the imagination, ―at once a brilliant portrait of a writer and an atmospheric, emotionally charged, riveting tale.