Alibi by Joseph Kanon

I loved the first third of Alibi. Thought the middle third kind of bogged down the story, then liked the last third. The premise is interesting. It's Venice just after World War II. Adam Miller, just recently out of the Army (where he was a war crimes investigator) has gone to Venice to visit his widowed mother. He is surprised to find his mother is romantically involved with Gianni, a doctor from an established Italian family. At a party thrown by his mother's friend Bertie, Adam meets Claudia, a Jewish Italian girl who physically survived being sent to a concentration camp during the war but is still psychologically wounded. That meeting sets his whole life on a different trajectory. This was the part of the book I liked. It's not the sparkling Venice of the tourists but the gloomy, damp Venice of the off-season overlaid with an air of suspicion about who was doing what with the Germans when they occupied Venice during the war--the consequences of which are still being played out. During the next part of the book, someone is murdered and the killers try to set up a perfect alibi. It looks like the plan will work until the police arrest an innocent man as the killer--at which point the real killers have to find a way to draw suspicion from him without implicating themselves. I thought this part of the book could have been edited to keep the pace of the story going better. There were too many "cat and mouse" head games with the police and too much angst over whether or not they would get caught. The last part of the book, in which the real killers try to save the accused killer's life, was more engrossing--and there were some good (and unexpected) plot twists near the end. I guess my final thought is that I liked this book but not as much as the author's earlier book, The Good German.