1944: The Ger­mans now occu­py Italy. It is bru­tal. A Jew­ish fam­i­ly from Flo­rence has fled south to Gub­bio, a medieval hill town in Umbria. When their three sons are slaugh­tered, a priest hides the fam­i­ly at great risk to him­self. Then, when Ital­ian par­ti­sans kill a Nazi offi­cer, Hitler demands that 40 inno­cent towns­peo­ple be exe­cut­ed. 

2024: Detec­tive Ari Greene, the only Jew­ish cop on the Toron­to homi­cide squad, is the son of Yitzhak Greene, a wise Holo­caust sur­vivor. Yitzhak has a deep secret: how he sought revenge after the war and now he’s ready to tell all to his 20-year-old grand­daugh­ter. 

To research this, his sev­enth nov­el in the Ari Greene series, author Robert Roten­berg spent years inter­view­ing sur­vivors and vet­er­ans, did exten­sive research about Italy dur­ing and after the war, trav­eled to Gub­bio to meet the now 94-year- old priest, and vis­it­ed the shrine to the 40 mar­tyrs. Much more than a sim­ple mur­der mys­tery, What We Buried asks the dif­fi­cult ques­tion: where is the line between jus­tice and revenge?