Ralph has already noticed Elsie in the neighborhood and made a nuisance of himself warning her about the dangers of life in the city, the wrong friends who will introduce her to drugs, casual sex, and prostitution.

The reviewer for the New York Times described it as "a characteristic drama of interlocking destinies and insidious obsessions" in which "Miss Highsmith has added another memorable portrait to her gallery of near-pathological loners.

"[1] He called it "not quite as powerful as the very best of Miss Highsmith's other novels" yet "in some respects more humane" in balancing a set of comfortably positioned and socially fulfilled New Yorkers against one menacing psychological figure.

[1] In the London Review of Books, Christopher Ricks praised the way Highsmith as a novelist straddles the borders of the crime genre and the "studies of alienation" of the best literature, as she places the character of Elsie "dead-set for success, garish and enslaved, in the world of glossy modelling and of lip-service to art, an underworld of unreality which comes on as the overworld".

The cold, no-attitude gaze that comes back at us is strangely exciting;: it works on us like both the blank interrogative stare of the psychoanalyst, offering us the liberating opportunity to articulate our most shameful desires, and the you-can't-have-me indifference of pornography, urging us to indulge ourselves when no one's looking.

Her thrillers take us into ourselves, no out of ourselves, and lead us to pleasures we hate to admit to–the kind of sneaky, self-abusive enjoyment that hypochondriacs find in poring over medical textbooks.... Highsmith's books are the queasiest fun imaginable.The Los Angeles Times enjoyed how the novel catches "the taste and texture of life in Manhattan ... [f]rom the exhilaration of discovering a previously overlooked Greek take-out restaurant to the feel of jogging through the empty, early-morning streets".

[7] Fiona Peters, in her study of Highsmith's writing, deems the violent act near the novels' close as "curiously out of place", but typical of the author's need to freeze her heroine in an ideal state, "surface without substantiality", rather than explore the life that awaits her in a world antagonistic to women.