MURDER IN MATERA

Stapinski (English/Fordham Univ.; Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music, 2004, etc.) continues her investigation into her family’s checkered past.

The narrative begins as an enticing page-turner, an investigative jewel sending readers racing to the next clue, as the author strikes out to find the truth about her great-great-grandmother Vita, “a murderess.” A trip to Stapinski’s ancestral home, Bernalda, in the Basilicata region of Italy’s instep, with her mother produced little information and a warning from hostile locals to let the past die. The oral history, jumbled and changed over generations, declared that Vita left for America in 1892 with three children, all from different fathers, losing one on the trip. At the time, a woman traveling without her husband was highly unusual, and the tales that Vita had committed murder compounded the mystery. Stapinski was fearful that her family, and her children, might carry the so-called “warrior gene.” Was the history of aggressive and criminal behavior in her genes unavoidable? Ten years after her first visit, the author headed back to Bernalda, this time equipped with research assistants and translators. A series of serendipitous encounters and acquaintances led Stapinski to a lawyer who knew the workings of the local legal system and, most importantly, steered her to Potenza, where a murder trial would have taken place. After, more digging into documents and local lore led to further questions and few concrete answers. Where were the fathers when Vita’s children were born? How did she lose one of her children? The author includes a cast of characters for “Now” and “Then,” and many of them are vivid and colorful in their own rights, but by the end, the narrative becomes overly imaginative, not grounded enough to satisfy as investigative history.

The book begins as a rollicking, magical tale but eventually bogs down in too much conjecture.