Murder in Matera
A True Story of Passion, Family, and Forgiveness in Southern Italy
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
“A thrilling detective story… Stapinski pursues the study of her family’s criminal genealogy with unexpected emotional results.” — Library Journal A writer goes deep into the heart of Italy to unravel a century-old family mystery in this spellbinding memoir that blends the suspenseful twists of Making a Murderer and the emotional insight of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.
Since childhood, Helene Stapinski heard lurid tales about her great-great-grandmother, Vita. In Southern Italy, she was a loose woman who had murdered someone. Immigrating to America with three children, she lost one along the way. Helene’s youthful obsession with Vita deepened as she grew up, eventually propelling the journalist to Italy, where, with her own children in tow, she pursued the story, determined to set the record straight.
Finding answers would take Helene ten years and numerous trips to Basilicata, the rural "instep" of Italy’s boot—a mountainous land rife with criminals, superstitions, old-world customs, and desperate poverty. Though false leads sent her down blind alleys, Helene’s dogged search, aided by a few lucky—even miraculous—breaks and a group of colorful local characters, led her to the truth.
Yes, the family tales she’d heard were true: There had been a murder in Helene’s family, a killing that roiled 1870s Italy. But the identities of the killer and victim weren’t who she thought they were. In revisiting events that happened more than a century before, Helene came to another stunning realization—she wasn’t who she thought she was, either.
Weaving Helene’s own story of discovery with the tragic tale of Vita’s life, Murder in Matera is a literary whodunit and a moving tale of self-discovery that brings into focus a long ago tragedy in a little-known region remarkable for its stunning sunny beauty and dark buried secrets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Italian-American author Stapinski (Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History) mines her immigrant family's roots to write a part memoir, part murder mystery that is entertaining in its plot if not elevating in its prose ("Ma would tell me about Vita as we sat in our bright yellow kitchen in Jersey City, New Jersey, circa 1969"). Combining nonfiction reportage and family history, Stapinski retells her decadelong search for the truth about the early life of her great-great-grandmother Vita and the murder she allegedly committed nearly two hundred years ago in her small Basilicata village before fleeing to the United States. The author posits that the darker side of her genealogy may have consequences for her own family: "All of us, I thought, are made up not only of what we know, but of all that we don't know as well," she writes as if the violence, revenge, and curses that accrued along with ignorance and poverty in Southern Italy in the 19th-century are somehow transmitted through DNA. The book enlivened by anecdotes about Italian culture will appeal to armchair travelers who long to visit the caves and culture of Matera.
