When novelist Patricia Highsmith moves into a small cottage in Suffolk, England, in the mid 1960s, she's hoping for seclusion and time to write, but she's also conducting an affair with Sam, a married woman. Unfortunately, young reporter Ginny Smythson-Balby has set her sights on Pat for an article she's writing, and constantly intrudes on her sanctuary. Where has Pat seen her before? Then Sam comes for a visit, and this crime fiction writer gets a taste of the real thing when tensions with Sam's husband escalate—with deadly results.

"[A] dreamlike, high-tension novel…. Dawson smoothly marries fact with fiction to capture the famously prickly Highsmith while astutely exploring love, obsession, and the myriad shades of darkness within us all."—Publishers Weekly