The wedding of the year is underway... HER DARK LIES is here!
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Happy release day to my new book baby! HER DARK LIES is available everywhere today, and I hope you LOVE it! I couldn’t be more excited to share Claire and Jack with you.
Today I thought I’d share a little about the setting — the magnificent Isle Isola, home to Villa la Scogliera, the house on the cliff, that belongs to the Compton family and is the site of Claire’s and Jack’s upcoming nuptials. I was very inspired by a trip to Lake Como and Isle Comacina, with its dark history and legends. I needed something bigger, and more remote, so I married it with Capri, pushed it out to the west, and voilà, a setting was born.
To get to know my fictional island, I wrote a magazine spread about it. In the book, this appears in Condé Nast, but of course, that, too is all in my imagination.
Here’s where the wedding of the year is taking place…
A Brief History of Isle Isola
Hidden away on the western edge of Italy in the southwest of the Tyrrhenian Sea, out of sight from the mainland and the more popular islands of Capri and Anicapri to its north, lies the isolated Isle Isola. Originally a remote, hard-to-reach private armory of Julius Caesar, it is sometimes thought to be the island from which Homer’s Scylla perched in the cliffs, waiting for unsuspecting questing sailors like Odysseus, who had to choose between sailing closer to the six-headed beast or sinking into the gaping maw of Charybdis’s whirlpool. It is also said the island houses an oracle, but no documentation has been found to prove this claim. There have been a disturbing number of shipwrecks in the waters of the bay, surprise waves driving ships against the rocks at the base of the cliffs, and storms are known to arise without warning.
A more speculative fiction surrounds it; like any remote area, rumors abound about the island’s many hauntings over the years, including a famed Gray Lady who lingers about the fortress, supposedly the ghost of the daughter of one of the island’s many generals, who was sacrificed, given to an enemy who brought a mighty navy to attack the island. When he came ashore to parlay, the young woman was given to the man in good faith and disappeared that very night in a terrible storm. The storm raged for weeks, and the invading navy was driven away.
Sea monsters and unverifiable history aside, Isola’s occupation dates to Roman times, and is home to the stunning Villa la Scogliera, the house on the cliff, currently home to famed cinematographer Will Compton. The Villa, a former monastery, perches on the hillside and ties into the abandoned Roman fortress. While the Villa itself is of this century, and has been modernized with electricity and water, the fortress, abandoned for centuries, is undergoing a full renovation, sponsored in part by the Italian antiquities committee and the Compton Foundation.
In addition to grapes and olives, the island is known for its lemon groves. It also houses a natural rookery, home to the many birds who fly off course, find themselves lost in the straights and unable to return to land.
I don’t know about you, but I’d like to go there immediately and explore the ruins, the labyrinth, the artists colony, and stare over the edge of that sheer, unforgiving cliff face. Just need to make sure I time it well, so I don’t bump into a killer…
