Painting the Invisible Man

Rita Schiano's novel, Painting the Invisible Man, was influenced by the 1976 murder of her father. Like Anna Matteo, the character in the story, Schiano was researching the archives of her hometown newspaper for a client when she made a keying error that led to the discovery of thirty-seven articles from the 1990s referencing her father, murdered in 1976. One such headline mentioned FBI surveillance tapes of a man bragging about getting away with murder twenty years before. Written as a contemporary historical fiction rather than as a memoir, Schiano confronted intensely challenging and personal issues and created a compelling story. It was published September 2007 by The Reed Edwards Company.