Tom Ripley is a calculating young man who believes it's better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody. He's hired to go to Italy to bring back the playboy son of a millionaire and soon is plunged into a daring scheme of duplicity, lies and murder.

"What have we learned (and what might we have forgotten) from history's bloody backwash? Guilt, love, and history are three skeins, woven together to create human beings or, alternately, human monsters. The question of wartime culpability undergirds the May-December romance in postwar Berlin between Hanna, a weary-looking, sexually rapacious streetcar ticket-taker and Michael, a young schoolboy whom she seduces, ravenously and to his great delight....

Tells of the Dashwood sisters, sensible Elinor and passionate Marianne, whose chances at marriage seem doomed by their family's sudden loss of fortune.