Libro: A Death in Malta: An assassination and a family’s quest for justice

A journalist’s account of the 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 the mother to three sons, who with their father have carried on the quest for justice and transparency after her death. Narrated by the youngest of them, the journalist Paul Caruana Galizia.