Testimony

By Scott Turow

Review by Roberta Earle

“Life had taught me a cold truth, that the long-savored dream, when tested by reality, rarely approached expectations.”

Bill ten Boom decides to quit his lucrative job as a partner in a law form, leave his life in the U.S., and take a job with the International Criminal Court in The Hague. At 54 years old, he is not sure where his life is going and he is hoping that the ICC, a permanent war crimes tribunal charged with prosecuting crimes against humanity, will help give his life some meaning and purpose.

For years there were rumors of mass murder of 400 Roma (gypsies) who disappeared from a refugee camp in Bosnia. After 11 years, a witness claims the Roma were massacred and he is the only survivor. The story starts with the witness relating his account of how all of his family and friends were buried alive in a cave near the refugee camp. It is a chilling story.

It is Bill ten Boom’s job to determine what actually happened on the night of April 27, 2004. As the story unfolds, Boom (as he likes to be called) confronts international bureaucracy, a disgraced general who seems to want to help uncover the truth, his own past (his parents were Dutch and left Holland just after WWII), a ruthless war criminal, and the complexity of the Bosnian war.

Scott Turow is a masterful storyteller and Testimony is one of his finest. The characters are multi-faceted, well developed, and believable. The story is a tangled legal thriller that will keep you reading late into the night.