“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.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Why do we sign our names? How can a squiggle both enslave and liberate? Signatures often require a witness-as if the scrawl itself is not enough. What other kinds of beliefs and longings justify our signing practices? Signature addresses these questions as it roams from a roundtable on the Greek island of Syros, to a scene of handwriting analysis conducted in an English pub, from a wedding in Moscow, where guests sign the bride's body, to a San Franciscan tattoo parlor interested in arcane forms. The signature's history encompasses ancient handprints on cave walls, autograph hunters, the branding of slaves, metaphysical poetry, medical malpractice, hip-hop lyrics, legal challenges to electronic signatures, ice cores harvested from Greenland, and tales of forgery and autopens. Part cultural chronicle, part travelogue, Signature pursues the identifying marks made by people, animals, and planetary forces, revealing the stories and fantasies hidden in their signatures. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

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