Review – The Last Witness

From the back cover: After a massacre at a Bosnian prison camp, a young girl is found alone, clutching a diary, so traumatized she can’t even speak. Twenty years later, the last witness to the prison guards’ brutal crimes must hunt down those responsible to learn what happened to her family.

Twenty years ago, after the fall of Yugoslavia, the world watched in horror as tens of thousands were killed or imprisoned in work camps during an “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia. Carla Lane has little knowledge of what went on halfway around the world when she was a child. She is living a near perfect life in New York City, married and soon to have a family of her own. But when her husband is murdered by a group of Serbian war criminals, strange memories start coming back, and she discovers that she underwent extensive therapy as a girl to suppress her memories. She is given her mother’s diary, which unlocks her childhood memories and reveals that she was, along with her parents and young brother, imprisoned in a war camp outside Sarajevo.

As her memories come back, it becomes clear that she is the last witness to a brutal massacre in the prison and that her brother may still be alive. She sets out to find her brother, but first she must hunt down the war criminals responsible for destroying her life. But these killers will stop at nothing to protect their anonymity and their deadly pasts…and are determined to silence the last witness to their crimes.

From the talented storyteller who gave us The Second Messiah, The Last Witness serves up another captivating and nail-biting thriller that will keep you holding your breath right to the end.

The Dictionary defines genocide as, “the deliberate killing of people who belong to a particular racial, political, or cultural group.” The Nazis tried that during World War II and Slobodan Milosevic attempted it in the 1990s. Mass rapes and concentration camps once again appear and it is into this environment that Carla Lane was thrown. She survives but is highly traumatized and twenty years later finds out her brother may still be alive. And the hunt is on. Carla for her brother and the war criminals are hunting her.  I love history and Glenn Meade knows how to blend history and fiction together to the point where you don’t know where one ends and the other begins.  Mr. Meade tells us that this story was actually told him by a young woman who had returned to Croatia in the hopes that her DNA might match with the bodies found in the mass graves and thus discover her real family.  That event led to the writing of “The Last Witness“.  Glenn Meade has given us a thriller as he practically puts the life of Carla in danger from page one.  Questions upon questions, deceit and betrayal will keep you guessing and flipping pages as fast as you can read.  Adventure, action, and mystery all packed inside a high octane, roller coaster ride of excitement.  So buckle yourself in and enjoy it.  I recommend this book highly.