Campaign for the American Reader: Ten top chases in literature

Chris Ewan is the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of many mystery and thriller novels. His most recent thriller is Long Time Lost, now available in the UK and forthcoming in the USA.

One of Ewan's top ten books which demonstrate that "the relationship between the hunted and the hunter can be an intense and strangely intimate one, with each anticipating the moves of the other, and in the crucible of the chase, with the psychological strains going both ways, it is sometimes unclear who is stalking whom," as shared at the Guardian:

The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Tom Ripley, the ultimate chameleon, is a man on the run; not simply from the repercussions of a minor postal scam in New York, but also the spectre of his own humdrum existence. Later, after he has murdered Dickie Greenleaf in Italy and assumed his identity, Tom finds himself hounded at various times by the police, an American private detective and by the suspicions of Dickie’s friends and family. As the net closes in, Tom finds that shedding his former shabby existence is as troublesome as evading justice.