THE EYEWITNESS

Sean Barrett begins his narration of this disturbing novel in a sonorous, mourning tone. Without care for delicate sensibilities, he moves the listener into a story of ethnic genocide in Sarajevo, drug trafficking, and prostitution in which young girls are auctioned as commodities. Barrett’s expert portrayals of an ex-vice squad detective from London, a beer-swilling Bosnian cop, a Russian mafia pimp, a 19-year-old who witnessed her family being loaded into a truck and driven into a Bosnian lake, and numerous Albanian gangsters are so believably presented that the reader might, with fear of confirming it, be driven to check the referenced Web sites. K.A.T. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine [Published: APR/MAY 05]