File Updated: 30/12/2008

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Bitter Lemon Press OCT-DEC 08
Jacques Chessex The Vampire of Ropraz Pbk published October 2008 by Bitter Lemon Press at £6.99 ISBN: 1904738338

See Review by Ian Morson Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger
A woman's coffin is found open in the village cemetery, her young body violated, limbs and breasts partly eaten. A farm hand is arrested. This is the true story that starts off this harrowing novel set in rural Switzerland.
1903, Ropraz, a small village in the Jura Mountains. The virginal daughter of a local judge dies of meningitis. On a howling December day a lone walker discovers her tomb recently opened, her body violated, left hand cut off, sex mutilated and heart torn out. Horror in the nearby villages, the return of atavistic superstitions, mutual suspicion in the heart of winter. Garlic and crucifixes are again brandished in this Protestant region. Then two more bodies are violated. Now a suspect must be found. Fevez, a stable boy with blood-shot eyes is arrested. He is convicted, subjected to psychiatric treatment and then vanishes in 1915. Chessex takes this true story and weaves it into a lyrical tale of fear and cruelty. This portrait of late 19th century country folk still in the thrall of vampirism sheds new light on our early 21st century urban obsessions with multiple rapists and psychopathic serial killers.

Jacques Chessex is one of Switzerland's great living writers. He is revered in France and won the Prix Goncourt in 1973 for L'Ogre...
The Translator
W.Donald Wilson, born in 1938, is a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He is a translator of fiction and non-fiction from the French and his work includes titles by Yves Thériault and Jean Heffer.

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