Review

Malta is a small island nation (an archipelago) in the Mediterranean Sea. It lies some 50 miles south of Italy and 207 miles north of Libya. It is all of 122 square miles in area and has a population of about 530,000. Malta secured its independence in 1964 and became a republic in 1974, and is a member of the European Union. For most of its modern existence, Malta has been laden with political corruption, a place of bribes and kickbacks that has persisted for years, substantially unchallenged by its complacent citizens many of whom feared reprisal. Enter the author's mother, Daphne Caruana Galizia, a political writer who later became an investigative journalist centering on the widespread corruption in Malta. She was an anti-corruption crusader and Malta's best-known journalist. She was threatened, her dog's throat was slit, and her house was set afire. When in 2015 she got access to the Panama Papers, acquired through a major data leak, she turned up the heat on the political corruption in Malta. These papers contained over 11 million documents that covered billions of dollars in off-shore financial transactions, a number of which implicated politicians in Malta, and she wrote about it. In 2017, the long campaign against her culminated in her assassination in a car bombing that blew her to pieces. In A Death in Malta, her son Paul writes about his mother and his family, about the history of Malta, and the rampant corruption and, after her death, the family's persistence in securing justice. I thought the first half of the book about Maltese history and the family was of mild interest for readers, but with the exposures in the Panama Papers, the story picks up dramatically and continues through her death and the investigation that ultimately lead to the murderers and who hired them. The work in the system of justice continues to this day. Reading this book made me recall a 60 Minutes segment a few years ago on the profitable business based in the Malta capital city of Valletta of securing and selling visas for European Union companies for dark figures unable to secure them on their own.

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