Alibi

by Joseph Kanon

First published 2005

Amazon

3.8(1,921)

Venice, 1946. Adam Miller, a former U.S. Army war-crimes investigator, comes to visit his widowed mother and hopes to leave behind what he has seen in defeated Germany. Instead he falls in love with Claudia, a Jewish woman whose wartime losses have left her with reasons to distrust the easy return to normal life. The elegant city around them is full of people trying to suppress memories of occupation, collaboration and survival.

When Adam begins to question the wartime record of his mother’s sophisticated Venetian suitor, private suspicion turns into a murder investigation shaped by compromised witnesses and uncertain guilt. Kanon uses post-war Venice to ask how justice can operate when evidence has vanished, reputations are being rebuilt and survivors know that legal innocence and moral innocence are not always the same thing.