SOURCE: A review of The Passion of Women, in Kirkus Reviews, Vol. LVIII, No. 15, August 1, 1990, pp. 1029-30.

In the following review, the critic contends that The Passion of Women is an erotic but slight mystery adventure.

Japrisot, who has long specialized in languorous, eroticized suspense (The Sleeping-Car Murders, One Deadly Summer, etc.), offers [in The Passion of Women] more erotic languor and less suspense than usual in this eight-dimensional portrait of a mysterious convict on the run.

As the novel begins, its hero falls to earth, dying from a gunshot wound. In a series of flashbacks featuring eight successive women he has encountered in his escape—a flight that has taken him from the coast of France to a Pacific island during wartime—the hero shows different faces, or at least different names, to each of his loves. Whether they know him as Vincent, Beau Masque, Tony, Francis...