SOURCE: A review of L'été meurtrier, in World Literature Today, Vol. 53, No. 1, Winter, 1979, p. 77.

In the following favorable review of One Deadly Summer, Walt notes Japrisot's use of multiple narrators.

Rebecca West, covering a trial of Southerners indicted in the wake of a "lynching bee," found a partial explanation for the townspeople's violence: the brutal heat that was a sovereign fact of life before the advent of air conditioning. Japrisot's characters (despite his title) are violent in season and out and throw morality to the winds, whether they blow from North Africa or the Alps.

Indeed, the event that sets off a train of horrors in L'été meurtrier [One Deadly Summer] occurs on a winter day when three men beat and rape an Austrian woman nicknamed "Eva Braun" by hostile French neighbors. The child she bears eight months later was supposedly fathered by one of the...