The Eyewitness

By Stephen Leather

Book Overview

Jack Solomon is a messenger of death. Working in the fractured remains of Yugoslavia, his task is to identify the victims of ethnic cleansing and to tell families that their loved ones are never coming home. Years of toiling in the killing fields have desensitised the former London policeman to the horrors of war, but when a truck containing twenty-six bodies is pulled from a lake, Solomon is unable to walk away from the case. He sets out to track down the only survivor of the massacre, a young girl on the run from the killers. Solomon's hunt for the last witness takes him from the brothels of Sarajevo to the high-stakes world of London's internet prostitution - where he will discover that the killers are closer to home than he thinks . . . ********* PRAISE FOR STEPHEN LEATHER 'A master of the thriller genre' Irish Times 'A writer at the top of his game' Sunday Express 'In the top rank of thriller writers' Jack Higgins

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0340734094
• ISBN13: 9780340734094
• Release Date: July 2003
• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Length: 407 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 4.5" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Leather Tingles

Stephen leather is one of those authors where I read one book and I immediately beginning tracking down all others by the same author. I've read about a dozen of Stephen Leather's books now, and I've got a couple more ready to go. I'm lucky. He hasn't written a dud yet so I know I've got some good reading ahead of me. His books are all reasonably similar. Crime, undercover work, elite force veterans, prisons, drug or weapons trading, exotic locations. You can be reasonably sure that three or four of these themes will pop up in one of his novels, along with a good, tension-filled, twisty plot, full of the sort of details that you and I aren't likely to encounter in our daily rounds. The Eyewitness doesn't disappoint. One of his best yarns, I thought. You've got to like the protagonist, a man with a mission, a man with a desire for justice, a man with a heart. He stands out in a world where very few share his views. The plot involves a search for the sole eyewitness to a horrific crime of mass murder, and the search takes him from the Balkans to London and back again. He doesn't give up, despite awesome obstacles and threats to life and limb, sometimes realised. Along the way we learn more about the seedy side of sex trafficking than we really want to. Five stars for this book. A book I loved, rather than just liked. Now excuse me, I've got a date with another Stephen leather thriller!

Escape into the oldest profession

"... (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.

Gotta hand it to Leahter he is great

The story starts off with Jack Solomon working for a non profit aid agency that uses DNA to help identify the victims that were killed and dumped in mass graves. The story thickens when he is called in to identify 26 bodies which were put into a fridge vehicle, which preserves the bodies and makes it harder for Jack to put this case behind him. He tries to track down an "Eyewitness" Hence the name. This takes him to the red light industries of Sarajevo and London as this person is a prostitute. The ending is good and for those people who like a bit of lets say romance there is a bit of that to. Great read Great read

A thinking man's thriller

Jack Solomon works for an aid organization in Sarajevo. His job is to identify the remains of the many dead bodies- the casualties of the war. The work is quite grisly, yet, with the use of DNA, the work gets done. One day Jack is asked to look into the remains of twenty six bodies found in a truck at the bottom of a lake. The bodies have been in place for years, yet, the frigid waters have preserved them remarkably well. A young child clutching a teddy bear is among the victims. The horrific nature of the crimes gets to Jack above all others. He insists on trying to solve the crime and does so by searching for the one surviving relative. His search takes him to the criminal underworld of Sarajevo, as well as, the red light district of London and encounters with the Russian Mafia. For a thriller, Stephen Leather's books have a languid pacing. They are character rich works that delve into whatever locale they are set. There is much local color interjected in the work. Once the topic is discussed and the plot is truly underway, the pacing begins to pick up quite rapidly. The climactic scene is literally quite explosive. The red herring at the end of the book is a bit farfetched and the conclusion a bit less than satisfying. Consider Stephen Leather's books to be thinking man's thriller more along the lines of LeCarre than Ludlum or Higgins.