Book Reviews

Since humankind first walked upright on this earth, the Balkans have been a troubled
passageway connecting East and West. Anyone who reads the history of that part of the
world can only be struck with amazement at the almost constant conflicts that sundered
the land and the peoples who tried to set down roots. From Vlad the Impaler to Tito to
Hitler and on to Milosevich in our own time, the part of the world we know as
Yugoslavia has been a place of upheaval and torment. Political and religious hatreds are
deep-seated and enduring. They have been part of the landscape for centuries. Sarejevo
was the site of the assassination that finally set off World War I.

Yugoslavia was created by the winners of WWI out of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia,
Croatia and part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was 1918, and unrest continued to
beset the region until after World War II when Josip Broz Tito became a strong man
president and brought relative calm to the area, calm that lasted until tito's death in 1980.

During WWII Yugoslavia was occupied by German troops. It was again a time of
brutality and unrest. At the beginning of the conflict, Tito was just another partisan,
making war against Germans, his fellow slavs, clawing his way to a position of power.
Unresolved conflicts between Christians, Muslims, Royalists and Communists rose to the
top of the bubbling witch's' brew. Over time, during the 1940's, Tito and the Partisan
movement, aided by the British, gained the ascendancy. His route to power was littered
by multiple legacies of old slights that resulted in numerous atrocities. During that time,
some Yugoslavs took advantage of the turmoil to visit vengeance on their neighbors.

Author Mark Munger has taken one such atrocity as the basis for this story of historical
murder in a far off land and modern murder in the forests of Northern Minnesota. In
1942 the mass murder of civilians, mostly women, children and few old men occurred in
a village beside the Sava River. The killers were members of the German SS and the
Ustaschi, a small group of Yugoslavians allied with the Germans against Tito and other
factions. From that event, witnessed by a German woman, devolves great anguish, love,
greed, thievery, and fifty years later, and thousands of miles away on another continent,
retribution of a sort. This novel is a good illustration of why anyone, including the
United Nations, who attempts to create a permanent solution to the troubles in the
Balkans, does so at their extreme peril.

Author Mark Munger too often allows his training as a lawyer to interfere with a more
direct, emotionally engaging style. The story has great power, and some of the characters,
are well worth reading about, but the novel is overlong and would have greatly benefited
from better word choices and major editing.