The Last Witness

June 23, 2014
The grisly conflict that tore apart the former Yugoslavia serves as the backdrop for this pedestrian and improbable thriller from Meade (The Second Messiah). As a child, Carla Lane witnessed the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Serbia, but, as an adult, she is unable to recall these traumatic experiences—that is, until her husband, concert pianist Jan, is killed in a car bombing by the Serbian war criminals-turned-international gangsters he had been hunting. Carla discovers her late mother’s diary and reads about her long-vanished brother, Luka, thereby recovering her last memory of him in a prison camp near Sarajevo. Despite having recently learned she’s pregnant, Carla resolves to undergo a dangerous journey to find Luka. Unfortunately, Meade’s worthwhile message about ethnic hatred, whether in the Balkans or elsewhere, is diluted by unlikely coincidences, shallow motivations, and broadly drawn characters like the villain with “terrifying gargoyles in the dark belfry of his mind.” Agent: Claudia Cross, Sterling Lord Literistic.

June 1, 2014
When Carla Lane's husband, a pianist, is killed by a bomb planted in his car, Carla is distraught. When she learns her husband actually lived a secret life, tracking down perpetrators of the Bosnian genocide in the 1990s, she's baffled. And when she discovers that she, too, was touched (when she was a child) by the genocide, she's determined to retrieve her lost memories, locate her long-missing brother, and find the people responsible for her husband's murder. If you buy into that rather elaborate setup, then you should have no problem enjoying this sharply written thriller; if, on the other hand, the setup feels forced, then the story that springs from it might feel likewise. Meade, whose previous history-based novels include The Second Messiah (2010) and The Romanov Conspiracy (2012), does a nice job of blending historical fact and mostly plausible fiction, and Carla Lane is a strong protagonist. Fans of the earlier books will also enjoy this one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)