“Scary and satisfying…I loved this novel…. Lappin’s people are as dangerously compelling as her Italy.” – Nina Auerbach, author of Our Vampires, Ourselves “Readers looking for an intelligent summer mystery will find much to savor here.” – Wilda Williams, Library Journal “Written in an elegant, relaxed style, with a plot that peels back slowly, the book bewitches…” – Mystery Scene Magazine “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.” – I Love a Mystery “Linda Lappin’s Signatures in Stone boasts a remarkable knitting of mystery and romance, a delicate and intricately concocted layering of mysteries.” – Gently Read “Lappin has populated a dilapidated villa and its adjacent park of grotesque sculptures with a vivid group of victims and suspects who turn out to be mysteries in themselves. While the primary pleasures of Signatures in Stone are its places and its people, the story itself satisfies because its twists are ingrained in the chasms of its setting and its characters.” – Walter Cummins, Rain Taxi.

The search for the soul of place is one of my passions as traveler, writer, and writing teacher. My work is often inspired by places: islands, ruins, old houses and buildings, and the atmospheres found there. For several years, I have been researching the "genius loci," the spirit or soul of place. The Romans and the Etruscans believed that every place--every mountain, field, body of water--had an indwelling spirit or soul, which was beneficial or harmful to human activity. And every house and household was believed to have a tutelary spirit. The soul of place was a force which shaped the character and atmosphere of a place and at the same time, an entity with which human beings were constantly interacting and communicating. This idea has stimulated me for a long time, and it has greatly influenced my writing.

This book offers insight into Greek conceptions of art, the artist, and artistic originality by examining artists' signatures in ancient Greece.

In 1866, Alexander Dunlop, a free black living in Williamsburg Virginia, did three unusual things. He had an audience with the President of the United States, testified in front of the Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction, and he purchased a tombstone for his wife, Lucy Ann Dunlop. Purchases of this sort were rarities among Virginia’s free black community—and this particular gravestone is made more significant by Dunlop’s choice of words, his political advocacy, and the racialized rhetoric of the period. Carved by a pair of Richmond-based carvers, who like many other Southern monument makers, contributed to celebrating and mythologizing the “Lost Cause” in the wake of the Civil War, Lucy Ann’s tombstone is a powerful statement of Dunlop’s belief in the worth of all men and his hopes for the future. Buried in 1925 by the white members of a church congregation, and again in the 1960s by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the tombstone was excavated in 2003. Analysis, conservation, and long-term interpretation were undertaken by the Foundation in partnership with the community of the First Baptist Church, a historically black church within which Alexander Dunlop was a leader. “Stories in Stone: Memorialization, the Creation of History and the Role of Preservation” examines the story of the tombstone through a blend of object biography and micro-historical approaches and contrasts it with other memory projects, like the remembrance of the Civil War dead. Data from a regional survey of nineteenth-century cemeteries, historical accounts, literary sources, and the visual arts are woven together to explore the agentive relationships between monuments, their commissioners, their creators and their viewers and the ways in which memory is created and contested and how this impacts the history we learn and preserve.