The Eyewitness Book

The Eyewitness, another admirably paced and plotted thriller from Stephen Leather, delves into ethnic genocide in the Balkans and the murky world of global prostitution. Jack Solomon, an ex-London vice squad detective, works for the International War Dead Commission in the former Yugoslavia. His job is identifying the victims of the ethnic atrocities "to put names to the dead" and, where necessary, pass cases on to the War Crimes Tribunal. In three years this cigarette-smoking investigator has seen a lot of terrible things, but when a van containing the bodies of 26 Kosovar Albanians, most from the same family, is pulled out of the river, something inside him snaps. He believes that one of the family, a young woman called Nicole, not only survived but also witnessed the murders. Jack sets out to find her. Ordered off the case by his number-crunching boss, he seeks the help of Dragan, a beer-swilling Bosnian cop. Convinced that Nicole has become a prostitute, Jack starts trawling the brothels. After a run in with Petrovic, a local hood, he discovers that she's now working as a call girl in London. Solomon heads back home but finds things have changed; Albanian gangsters have muscled in on Soho and the Internet has revolutionised the skin trade. With the Russian Mafia, Sasha, a Serbian super-pimp, and Inga, one of his sex slaves, on Jack's tail, tracking Nicole down proves more difficult than he had first surmised. However, as Leather's surprising denouement confirms, where the Balkans are concerned you can never be too sure who your friends are, or who is really innocent or guilty. --Travis ElboroughRead More