Linda Lappin

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SIGNATURES in STONE WINNER  DAPHNE DU MAURIER AWARD FOR MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE WRITING  BEST MYSTERY OF 2013

 

"I was enthralled by Lappin's Italy… and by that god/demon/boar that flits through its landscape" Nina Auerbach, critic, author of Our Vampires, Ourselves

"Lappin is a modern day Agatha Christie with prose that is like eating dark chocolate or sipping a glass of fine wine — the story continues to entice your senses and simply gets better and better the more you partake. Not one to hurry to the plot, she unveils the scenes piece by piece, character by character and leaves her own signatures for you to find along the way." Vikki Walton I Love a Mystery

 

from LIBRARY JOURNAL

Lappin, Linda. Signatures in Stone: A Bomarzo Mystery. Caravel: Pleasure Boat Studio. 2013. 285p. ISBN 9781929355907. pap. $18. MYS
Ensconced by her forceful publisher Nigel in a rundown villa in the Italian town of Bomarzo, writer Daphne DuBlanc (Marilyn Mosley is her nom de plume) is stuck for an idea for her next Edna Rutherford mystery. It doesn't help that she has smoked the last of the hashish she secretly brought from Paris. "Without inspiration I could not write. What was needed was a new batch of signatures, those curious messages our waking life sends us from our unconscious, which I have come to see as promptings from the muse, and even as a spiritual guide for my own existence." But as she begins to explore the villa, which is filled with priceless artistic treasures, and the neighboring 16th-century sculpture garden known as the Monster Park, Daphne finds signs and clues—a broken head of a china doll, a pearl button, an ancient map—to deeper mysteries about this strange place and its inhabitants: the gatekeeper Manu and his daughter Amelia, Professor Firestone, an American art history scholar writing about the Monster Garden, Clive, a novice painter, and even the down-at-heel aristocratic Nigel.
Verdict Deftly mixing fascinating art history and murder with an exotic atmospheric setting (the Bomarzo garden actually exists), dramatic historical period (1928 fascist Italy), and fully fleshed characters, Lappin (The Etruscan) has written a hallucinatory gothic mystery in which no one is as they appear. Daphne is a most memorable, if a bit unreliable (thanks to her opium habit), narrator. Readers looking for an intelligent summer mystery will find much to savor here.—Wilda Williams, Library Journal

Thirty years ago on a drab spring day of gray clouds and punishing winds, I stumbled upon the Park of Bomarzo, where I explored its meanders almost in complete solitude. I knew nothing about the philosophy behind formal Italian gardens at that time – or why this place was such a radical deviation from the norm. I knew nothing about the man who had willed it into being as a memorial to his wife: Pier Francesco (aka Vicino) Orsini, a visionary and alchemist.

That morning, I found the grounds overgrown and ill-kept, silent and dreary, its eerie sculptures deeply veined in moss. I marveled at twin-tailed mermaids, busty griffins, jolly little bears holding up heraldic shields. I climbed into a cavern which was an ogre's mouth where "All thoughts fly," and lost my balance in a leaning tower.

Some of the surreal sculptures emerging from interwoven ilex boughs reminded me of figures in alchemical treatises; others evoked gods and goddesses of Greek mythology. Some portrayed disturbing acts of violence. I came away stunned by the strangeness of it all, and by the very strong feeling that it concealed a message transmitted through time – but who could read it now?

 

Over the next two decades or so, the mystery of the Park gnawed at my imagination. I had more opportunities to visit Bomarzo, to learn about the extraordinary area of the Tuscia, home to several esoteric gardens both ancient and contemporary, and to puzzle over this one. Volumes have been filled with debates concerning the artist/s who designed and executed the Bomarzo sculptures, and especially concerning what the whole thing is supposed to mean.

Some critics claim the park is a book of emblems hewn in stone. Others, a collection of images drawn from Vicino's nightmares. It does make a powerful impression on all those who visit there, not always a pleasant one. There is something rough, somber and unsettling about the park, which Vicino described as The Sacred Grove.

 

Many critics believe that the Bomarzo Park was designed as a pathway to initiation – and that the hallucinatory sculptures mark the phases on a spiritual journey leading down through hell or the underworld and back up into the light. Near the center of the park a giantess triumphs –identified as Persephone, watched over by a Hades sprawled high above a fountain. The journey traced by the park's walkways then is akin to the Eleusinian mysteries- the search to find and liberate a lost child—which may be our own innocence, our essence, our soul.

After years of reading and dreaming about the place, and many visits in different seasons, the outline of a story began to knit itself together in my imagination: the story of a woman, a writer, who while visiting the area finds herself ensnared in two separate mysteries: the mystery of the park and its meaning and the solving of a crime.

In my novel, Signatures in Stone, occult mystery writer Daphne DuBlanc comes to Bomarzo to write a new book, but ends up as the prime suspect for a murder that takes place in the park. Daphne has a theory that by reading signs or "signatures" scattered all around us, we can uncover hidden truths and even predict the future. She finds the park full of signatures which she must interpret to save her skin and solve the crime. In doing so, she will also unravel the enigma of the Park of Monsters: Who made it — and why —and above all, she will discover the secret of its destructive and redemptive power over all those who wander there.