From Publishers Weekly
It's late 1945 at the start of this atmospheric historical thriller, and G.I. Adam Miller, officially assigned to ferret out Nazi war criminals in Germany, joins his widowed mother, Grace, who has recently arrived in Venice from New York to resume her life as a wealthy American expatriate. Together, they flow into the social eddies of the upper class, determined to pick up where they left off in 1939. Grace has met an old flame, Gianni Maglione, a distinguished doctor whom Adam suspects of gold-digging. Meanwhile, Adam himself meets Jewish Claudia Grassini, who survived the Nazi pogroms by becoming the mistress of a powerful Italian Fascist. The novel's languid pace picks up when Claudia meets Maglione, whom she accuses not only of being a Nazi collaborator but also of having condemned her own father to Auschwitz. Further complications arise with the appearance of Rosa, an Italian operative and former partisan. Kanon (The Good German, etc.) keeps his complex plot—involving murder, elaborate alibis, false accusations and a web of secrets spinning back to the war—on track, although the various entanglements aren't always neatly unraveled. Adam and Claudia's love affair provides the requisite romance, but there's no sense that they find much to like in one another. More interesting is Kanon's portrait of a pathetic and hopelessly naïve group of wealthy people out of touch with the postwar world's reality. Agent, Amanda Urban. Author tour. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In The Good German (2001), Kanon superbly evoked the post-apocalyptic, pockmarked moonscape of 1946 Germany. Now he turns to postwar Venice, where there are no pockmarks but the survivors are equally shell-shocked by the nearness of evil. Adam Miller, fresh from a stint as a war crimes investigator in Frankfurt, arrives in Vienna to visit his globe-trotting mother, who is holding tenuously to the remains of her fortune and embarking on an autumnal romance with a Venetian doctor whose wartime associations with the Nazis remain troubling if obscure. Miller begins a tumultuous romance with a Jewish woman whose own wartime experience has left her with deep psychic wounds. Soon enough the past can no longer remain hidden as a stunning murder leaves Adam torn between righting wrongs and protecting those he loves and himself. In a world where alibis are the currency of the era--everyone was "somewhere else when the air-raid sirens covered the sounds of people being dragged off"--Adam attempts to tread lightly through a landscape loaded with moral land mines. As before, Kanon juxtaposes a powerful love story and a gripping thriller against a palpable historical moment, but this time his hero can't quite shoulder the burden, his naive American assumptions about right and wrong leaving him ill-equipped to respond and never quite able to garner our full sympathy. And, yet, the novel holds us completely, with its vision of a sadly inadequate hero striking deep at our worst fears about ourselves. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Praise for The Good German:
“[Kanon] is fast approaching the complexity and relevance not just of le Carré and Greene but even of Orwell: provocative, fully realized fiction that explores, as only fiction can, the reality of history as it is lived by individual men and women.”—The New York Times Book Review
Book Description
From the bestselling author of LOS ALAMOS and THE GOOD GERMAN comes a riveting tale of love, revenge and murder set in postwar Venice
It is 1946, and a stunned Europe is beginning its slow recovery from the ravages of World War II. Adam Miller has come to Venice to visit his widowed mother and try to forget the horrors he has witnessed as a U.S. Army war crimes investigator in Germany. Nothing has changed in Venice—not the beautiful palazzi, not the violins at Florian’s, not the shifting water that makes the city, untouched by bombs, still seem a dream. But when Adam falls in love with Claudia, a Jewish woman scarred by her devastating experiences during the war, he is forced to confront another Venice, a city still at war with itself, haunted by atrocities it would rather forget. Everyone, he discovers, has been compromised by the Occupation—the international set drinking at Harry’s, the police who kept order for the Germans, and most of all Gianni Maglione, the suave and enigmatic Venetian who happens to be his mother’s new suitor. And when, finally, the troubled past erupts in violent murder, Adam finds himself at the center of a web of deception, intrigue, and unexpected moral dilemmas. When is murder acceptable? What are the limits of guilt? How much is someone willing to pay for a perfect alibi? Using the piazzas and canals of Venice as an enthralling but sinister backdrop, Joseph Kanon has again written a gripping historical thriller. ALIBI is at once a murder mystery, a love story, and a superbly crafted novel about the nature of moral responsibility.
About the Author
JOSEPH KANON is the author of three previous novels, The Good German, Los Alamos and The Prodigal Spy. Before becoming a full-time writer, he was a book publishing executive. He lives in New York City.
Alibi FROM THE PUBLISHER
It is 1946, and a stunned Europe is beginning its slow recovery from the ravages of World War II. Adam Miller has come to Venice to visit his widowed mother and try to forget the horrors he has witnessed as a U.S. Army war crimes investigator in Germany. Nothing has changed in Venice—not the beautiful palazzi, not the violins at Florian's, not the shifting water that makes the city, untouched by bombs, still seem a dream. But when Adam falls in love with Claudia, a Jewish woman scarred by her devastating experiences during the war, he is forced to confront another Venice, a city still at war with itself, haunted by atrocities it would rather forget. Everyone, he discovers, has been compromised by the Occupation—the international set drinking at Harry's, the police who kept order for the Germans, and most of all Gianni Maglione, the suave and enigmatic Venetian who happens to be his mother's new suitor. And when, finally, the troubled past erupts in violent murder, Adam finds himself at the center of a web of deception, intrigue, and unexpected moral dilemmas. When is murder acceptable? What are the limits of guilt? How much is someone willing to pay for a perfect alibi? Using the piazzas and canals of Venice as an enthralling but sinister backdrop, Joseph Kanon has again written a gripping historical thriller. ALIBI is at once a murder mystery, a love story, and a superbly crafted novel about the nature of moral responsibility.
FROM THE CRITICS
Joseph Finder - The New York Times
Venice, the ancient city-state so renowned for conspiracies and assassinations, where out-of-favor doges were blinded over live coals and bodies strung up between the ''fatal pillars'' of the Doge's Palace turned red from blood, was largely spared the bombing of the last world war. It was never a center of wartime intrigue. Yet Kanon has chosen Venice as the unlikely location for his latest novel, Alibi, and it turns out to have yielded his richest, most full-blooded work to date.
Patrick Anderson - The Washington Post
What do we make of all this? I have a friend who reads thrillers not for their plots but for their "atmospherics," and I think she would probably love Alibi. For my part, I think Kanon writes gorgeous prose and creates intriguing characters, but this time he has given us a story that is a bit overwrought. Still, if you want to explore life, love, death, beauty and moral confusion -- all glimpsed from a gondola, so to speak -- you won't do much better than this.
Publishers Weekly
It's late 1945 at the start of this atmospheric historical thriller, and G.I. Adam Miller, officially assigned to ferret out Nazi war criminals in Germany, joins his widowed mother, Grace, who has recently arrived in Venice from New York to resume her life as a wealthy American expatriate. Together, they flow into the social eddies of the upper class, determined to pick up where they left off in 1939. Grace has met an old flame, Gianni Maglione, a distinguished doctor whom Adam suspects of gold-digging. Meanwhile, Adam himself meets Jewish Claudia Grassini, who survived the Nazi pogroms by becoming the mistress of a powerful Italian Fascist. The novel's languid pace picks up when Claudia meets Maglione, whom she accuses not only of being a Nazi collaborator but also of having condemned her own father to Auschwitz. Further complications arise with the appearance of Rosa, an Italian operative and former partisan. Kanon (The Good German, etc.) keeps his complex plot involving murder, elaborate alibis, false accusations and a web of secrets spinning back to the war on track, although the various entanglements aren't always neatly unraveled. Adam and Claudia's love affair provides the requisite romance, but there's no sense that they find much to like in one another. More interesting is Kanon's portrait of a pathetic and hopelessly naOve group of wealthy people out of touch with the postwar world's reality. Agent, Amanda Urban. Author tour. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Adam hopes that in Venice he'll leave behind the horrors of World War II, but falling for the Jewish Claudia makes him confront the complicity of those around him. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Venice-just after WWII-full of charm and romance, secrets and lies. Adam Miller, newly discharged from the U.S. Army, joins his mother, newly arrived in Venice. She's taken a house on the Grand Canal. Both are at loose ends-Grace because it's in her nature to be that way, Adam because the war and its aftermath have unsettled him, left him emotionally wary. At a party, however, he meets lovely Claudia Grassini and plunges into a passionate affair with her. The attraction is mutual, but Claudia is a complex woman with a painful, embittering history. She's an Italian Jew the Fascists sent to their pet concentration camp at Fossoli, where she knows she should have died along with all the others. The fact that she didn't has burdened her with survivor guilt. Meanwhile, Grace has romance in her life, too. His name is Gianni Mangioni, a doctor, an aristocrat and an old flame. In the years between the wars, they were part of a circle of friends who romped together the way only the rich and privileged can. But Adam doesn't trust Gianni, senses something bogus about him, wonders what he was up to when the Germans were in Occupation. Until his discharge, Adam was an intelligence officer and war crimes investigator in Berlin, and he decides to make a project out of Gianni, a decision that opens Pandora's box with a vengeance: people die, lives are ruined and Adam finds himself confronting excruciating choices-not only the one between justice and legality, but the rarer, more subtle, harder one between justice and morality. Interesting characters, an affecting love story and a strong plot that unfortunately sags midway. But Kanon (The Good German, 2001, etc.) is a true talent: eventually, he mightwrite thrillers as impeccable as Graham Greene's. Author tour
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