Silent Witness

by Robert White

Mystery set in California involves a juvenile and his social case worker trying to find the true killer.

Genres: Horror

218 pages, Paperback

First published April 29, 1991

About the author

Librarian's note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name
For other authors of this name, see:

Robert White - British Crime Novels

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 2 out of 5]

This started off with an interesting premise, but it never really lived up to it. The book is set in the 1960s although published in 1991 and we have two story arcs that converge rather quickly. First, we have Brill, an Nazi doctor who worked with the SS and is now living in the rain forest in Brazil. Brill's wife is paralyzed from an accident but their daughter Nicole is a healthy 12 year old gild. Brill's estate is very remote, only reachable via boat on a river and Nicole is quite alone and lonely. She has a teddy bear who she 'talks with', but the servants do not last long and do not socialize with the family. Brill has a lab set up on the estate, and nasty rumors circulate about it. Seems like a cool, mad Nazi doctor story!

The second story arc takes place in California and focuses upon Peter. Peter is a few years older than Nicole and it eventually comes out that he has some relation to the Nazis and Nicole. Without spoilers, I will just say that Peter's mother and father are related to Klaus, who lives near the Brill estate and works at being a missionary to the locals there. One day Klaus comes to see his younger brother, Peter's father, and tells Peter about Nicole and they start being penpals...

For all the splashy cover blurbs and the great horror premise-- mad old Nazi doctors doing strange experiments on people in the rain forest, 'secrets that should have stayed buried' (blurb), 'a mad doctor experiments with the dead-- and the living...' (blurb), the story really devolved into something quite different, and definitely not the least bit scary. To go into the plot more will involve spoilers, but I will just say I finished the last 50 pages or so almost out of spite. 2 weak stars.

[Boris Cesnik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like climbing down a high mountain, starting from the peak of early chapters where you breathe the incumbent dark atmosphere of a unsettling horror story full of eerie and realistic elements; then you feel excited and overwhelmed by all these spooky clues...which slowly step by step while walking down a cliff get replaced by intrusive developments that turn this ride into a disappointing descent into a lighter crime drama. All those juicy suspense tricks give way to a more down to earth post war cat and mouse game without proper links or explanations that makes the story more surreal than the earlier possible supernatural episodes.
The lack of development in the most terrifying ingredients is counterbalanced by the nostalgic narrative and writing which propels this 1991 novel in the old constellation of 1930-40's potboilers.