Ah, summer! Doesn’t it just make you want to jump on a boat to somewhere sunny, make a brand new friend, and kill him with an oar?

No?

Well, I guess you aren’t Tom Ripley and the police are going to have to look elsewhere. Although, good luck to them. 2015 marks 60 years since he began his one-man crimewave and he’s more than got away with it so far.

To celebrate the beginning of this nefarious career we’re going to take a look at The Talented Mr Ripley in June’s Reading group. There’s a pleasing bit of synchronicity here. Following on from the delights of Jan Morris’s Venice in April, we now get to see the city through rather different eyes: “He liked the fact that Venice had no cars. It made the city human. The streets were like veins, he thought, and the people were the blood, circulating everywhere.”

There’s also the happy coincidence that the latest Patricia Highsmith adaptation has just hit the big screen, Carol. By all accounts it’s well worth watching, so perhaps we can touch on that later in the month. I’ll also be keen to talk about the fantastic Anthony Minghella adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley, which is starting to look like a classic. But first and foremost, there’s the writing itself – the clinical prose that gets you on edge right from the word go:

Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way. Tom walked faster. There was no doubt that the man was after him.”

How not to read on? I hope you’ll join me.

In the meantime, all suggestions for possible things to look at in the book and Patricia Highsmith’s remarkable career will be much appreciated as usual. We have five copies of The Talented Mr Ripley to give away to the first five readers in the UK to post “I want a copy please” – along with a nice, constructive comment relevant to High – in the comments section below.

If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, don’t forget to email Laura Kemp with your address (laura.kemp@theguardian.com), as we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to her, too

Finally, some advance notice of good things to come. On 9 June at 1pm we’ll be talking to Ian Martin, the co-author, with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen, of The Science of Discworld.

In July, meanwhile, we’re going to revisit a book we’ve already covered in the Reading group, To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s going to be interesting to see how we feel about it two years later. It’s going to be even more interesting to move on from it to Go Set A Watchman, which I’ll be reading as soon as it comes out …