My book review of Paul Caruana Galizia’s A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family’s Quest for Justice is now up over at The Markaz Review.

I was honoured to be commissioned to write the piece for such a prestigious publication, thanks to poaching by one of its editors, the Malta-based Rayyan al-Shawaf. I tackled it with some abandon (the original draft was far longer and far more winding), because the book itself is a heady hybrid that cuts to the bone while also providing the necessary context for an international audience.

The politics and ‘true-crime’ angle are very much in there, and will appease the readership looking for the necessary does of robust, hard-nosed investigative journalism that the Caruana Galizia family as whole is now renowned for.

But it’s the ostensibly ‘digressive’ passages that really struck a chord with this reviewer… one who’s had to internalise the Maltese context the hard way, and one who’s also lost their mother at a young age.

There’s a tendency among us Maltese to have to ‘explain’ what Malta is to the rest of the world. Usually this is done with pre-packaged touristy pride: the brochure version of the island’s greatest hits. But the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia led to a dark inversion of that habit, and this book by her youngest son offers the starting point of an in-depth exploration of what such an inversion implies.