*Kanon,
Joseph. Alibi. Holt. May 2005. c.416p. ISBN 0-8050-7886-X.
$26.00. Fiction.
In 1946, Adam Miller comes to Venice to
join his widowed mother, Grace, a member of the wealthy expatriate
community. Grace is eager for her son to meet her new companion,
Dr. Gianni Maglione, but Adam, formerly a war crimes investigator
in Germany, is suspicious of the doctor’s intentions.
Meanwhile, Adam is distracted by a passionate relationship
with Claudia Grassini, a Jew who survived an internment camp
in Italy, until Claudia, at the engagement party for Grace
and Gianni, accuses the doctor of having betrayed her father
to the Germans. Events soon spiral out of control; a violent
murder will cause Adam to question everything he once thought
true. In his fourth novel, Kanon (The Good German) offers an
engrossing drama where the ultimate mystery, as one of the
characters notes, is not “who done it” but who
people are. A brilliant evocation of postwar Venice is the
backdrop for a series of moral dilemmas that wrench the soul.
Highly recommended for all public libraries.