The Last Witness

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.” [em]Agent: Claudia Cross, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Aug.) [/em]