A Death in Malta

Book excerpt: “A chronicle of the sort of silencing-by-murder that we might have thought happens only in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. . . . [and] a son’s distraught but beautiful tribute to his journalist-mother. . . . Exquisite.” —Wall Street Journal A journalist’s spellbinding account of the shocking murder of his muckraking mother and a quest for justice that has reverberated far beyond their tiny homeland An archipelago off the southern coast of Italy, Malta is a picturesque gem eroded by a climate of corruption, polarization, inequality, and a virtual absence of civic spirit. In this unpromising soil, a fearless journalist took root. Daphne Caruana Galizia fashioned herself into the country’s lonely voice of conscience, her muckraking and editorializing sending shock waves that threatened to topple those in power and made her at once the island’s best-known figure and its most reviled. In 2017, a campaign of intimidation against her culminated in a car bombing that took her life. Daphne was also he devoted and inspiring mother to three sons, who with their father have carried on the quest for justice and transparency after her death. Spellbindingly narrated by the youngest of them, the award-winning journalist Paul Caruana Galizia, A Death in Malta is at once a study in heroism and the powerful story of a family’s crusade for accountability in a society built on lies, with reverberations far beyond their homeland.