[In the following excerpt, Boucher offers a favorable review of Trap for Cinderella, contending that the novel is "a beautifully intricate essay in novel-writing and mystery-making."]

Sebastien Japrisot, the French translator (of J. D. Salinger among others), achieved a good deal of recognition here last year with his first novel, Compartiment Tueurs, translated as The 10:30 From Marseilles—a book which most reviewers, including me, welcomed as the most interesting French import in the crime field since the debut of Simenon. Meanwhile his second novel, Piège Pour Cendrillon, went on to win the Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière, the most prestigious of France's many crime-novel awards. It has now been ably translated by Helen Weaver, as Trap for Cinderella.

This is a beautifully intricate essay in novel-writing and mystery-making, in which the narrator, having almost been burned to death, finds herself with a mind wiped blank and a body reconstructed by plastic surgery—so that she has no notion whether she is the madcap heiress people tell her she must be. If she is, who tried to kill her? If she is not, may she herself be a murderess? The uncertainties and ambivalence are sustained with great skill. I still find The 10:30 even more impressive, both in plot and in writing; but Trap certainly maintains Japrisot's reputation as a highly original and professional writer of murder-suspense.