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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Escape into the oldest profession, 27 Dec 2005
"... (Solomon) reckoned that sitting in a car with an Albanian pimp, his bodyguard and two heavily armed Croatian thugs on he way to a shoot-out in a Bosnian brothel would make anyone nervous." Such is the approaching moment of truth for Jack Solomon, an investigator employed with the International War-dead Commission in the Balkans. Jack's job is to coordinate the identification by DNA of the bodies of civilians killed in the ethnic cleansing atrocities in Kosovo and Bosnia, and then notify surviving family members. Jack's latest case involves twenty-six Bosnian Muslims - men, women and children from the same extended family - found locked in the back of a refrigerator truck at the bottom of a lake. Death had been by suffocation some three years previous. But the chill of the lake had preserved the bodies perfectly, and Solomon takes the presence among the dead of an eighteen-month old girl, still clutching her teddy bear, hard. Further investigation indicates that one member of the clan survived, sixteen-year old Nicoletta. Jack's self-imposed mission is to track her down so she can testify before the War Crimes Tribunal. But the girl has run, apparently disappearing into the dark world of indentured prostitution. After Jack runs afoul of one of the region's most vicious and powerful criminal bosses, his boss sends him back to the safety of London, where, as chance would have it, Nicoletta is now an escort agency hooker. THE EYEWITNESS is a fascinating look at the callous, and sometimes appallingly vicious, business of international trafficking in prostitutes. Author Stephen Leather's description of the London sex-for-money scene, from the girls working out of the traditional Soho walk-ups to the burgeoning Web-based outcall/incall enterprises, is comprehensive. Research in depth, I'd say. While Solomon is undeniably the Good Guy in this thriller, and there are also Bad Guys depraved enough to make your skin crawl, perhaps some of the most interesting characters are those falling somewhere in between in the most unexpected ways. Indeed, there's a plot twist at the end that was completely unexpected. In the Acknowledgements, Leather thanks working girls "Angela, Francesca, Jessica, Kim and Sophie" for their insights into the flesh trade. Perhaps it's from them that one of the author's characters, Inga, leaves us the message: "I chose this life. I wasn't forced into it ... We do what we must to survive ... and we make the best of it." I think that those words could come from any of us, especially from myself as I drive into the 9 to 5 that I sometimes abhor.
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by Stephen Leather
by Stephen Leather
by Stephen Leather
by Stephen Leather
by Stephen Leather
