A Sunny Place for Shady People
How Malta Became One of the Most Curious and Corrupt Places in the World
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The car bomb assassination of Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017 shocked the European Union and put the world’s spotlight on an island so small that few knew it was an independent country and even fewer could find it on the map. But Caruana Galizia’s death didn’t come as a surprise to those who lived there.
Ryan Murdock had visions of living a slow-paced island life on the Mediterranean while writing about his experiences, so in 2011 he moved from Canada to Malta. To the casual visitor, Malta is a sleepy place with sun-soaked shorelines and ancient fortified harbors. Murdock imagined it to be an archipelago island of warm weather, gorgeous views, busy cafes, and grilled fish dinners. On the surface, it was.
The six years Murdock spent in Malta revealed an insular culture whose fundamental baseline is amoral familism, a worldview in which any action taken to benefit one’s family or oneself is justifiable, regardless of whether it is legal or ethical. In such a place murder may or may not be wrong, depending on what one thinks of another’s politics. This pervasive perspective created a culture of corruption that rose all the way to the top of the island nation. The office of the prime minister was implicated in Caruana Galizia’s murder, and the investigation continues to reveal a government mired in money laundering, human trafficking, fuel smuggling, and the sale of EU passports to Russian and Middle Eastern oligarchs.
Interspersed with personal narrative, Murdock delves into Malta’s unique geopolitical, cultural, ethnic, and religious history—one that transformed it from a hub of prehistoric rule into a modern society where a powerful cabal of political and business leaders nearly got away with murder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A culture of lawlessness infects the Mediterranean island of Malta from high government offices to the lowliest villages, according to this furious exposé-cum-travelogue. Travel writer Murdock (Vagabond Dreams), who lived in Malta from 2011 to 2017, spotlights the 2017 car bombing there that killed his colleague Daphne Caruana Galizia after her muckraking journalism implicated then–prime minister Joseph Muscat in financial scandals. Murdock backgrounds this absorbing (and pretty gruesome) true-crime story—"The first explosion tore off her leg.... She'd only just begun to scream when... a larger explosion engulfed her car in a ball of fire"—with typical travel-writer exasperation at local quirks, like anarchic traffic and the maddening drumbeat of fireworks, which turn gradually more sinister. Murdock reports that he was the object of covert watchfulness wherever he went, his house was vandalized, and his wife was shot at by poachers. Complaining of a society-wide ethos of "amoral familism," in which people grab what they can for their families via nepotism, influence-peddling, and theft of public funds, Murdock writes with a biting wit (the island's nightlife district is a vista of "abandoned Burger King containers and vomit slicks") that shades into somber lyricism ("Those... village streets felt huddled and forlorn, heavy with... old fears"). It's a potent portrayal of a society mired in corruption. Photos.