‘Tantalizing’ – NPR

“An exciting 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 within this spellbinding memoir that blends the suspenseful twists of Making a Murderer and the emotional insight of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.

Since youth, Helene Stapinski heard lurid tales about her great-great-grandmother, Vita. In about Murder In Matera: A GENUINE Story of Enthusiasm, Family, and Forgiveness in Southern Italy Southern Italy, she was a loose woman who had murdered somebody. Immigrating to America with three kids, she lost one on the way. Helene’s younger obsession with Vita deepened as she grew up, eventually propelling the journalist to Italy, where, with her personal children in tow, she pursued the story, determined to set the record right.

Selecting answers would take Helene ten years and numerous trips to Basilicata, the rural ‘instep’ of Italy’s boot-a mountainous property rife with crooks, superstitions, old-world customs, and desperate poverty. Though fake leads delivered her down blind alleys, Helene’s dogged search, aided with a few lucky-even miraculous-breaks and several colorful local personas, led her to the truth.

Yes, the family stories she’d heard had been true: There have been a murder in Helene’s family members, a killing that roiled 1870s Italy. But the identities of the killer and victim weren’t who she believed these were. In revisiting occasions that happened greater than a hundred years before, Helene came to another stunning realization-she wasn’t who she thought she was, either.

Weaving Helene’s have story of discovery using the tragic tale of Vita’s life, Murder in Matera can be a literary whodunit and a moving tale of self-discovery that provides into focus a long ago tragedy within a little-known region remarkable because of its amazing sunny beauty and dark buried secrets.