The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia: A novel

by Juliet Grames

Overview

One unidentified skeleton. Three missing men. A village full of secrets. The best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna brings us a sparkling—by turns funny and moving—novel about a young American woman turned amateur detective in a small village in Southern Italy.

Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail, either.

Most troubling, though, is the human skeleton that surfaced after the flood waters receded. Who is it? And why don’t the police come and investigate? When the local priest's housekeeper begs Francesca to help determine if the remains are those of her long-missing son, Francesca begins to ask a lot of inconvenient questions. As an outsider, she might be the only person who can uncover the truth. Or she might be getting in over her head. As she attempts to juggle a nosy landlady, a suspiciously dashing shepherd, and a network of local families bound together by a code of silence, Francesca finds herself forced to choose between the charitable mission that brought her to Santa Chionia, and her future happiness, between truth and survival.

Set in the wild heart of Calabria, a land of sheer cliff faces, ancient tradition, dazzling sunlight—and one of the world’s most ruthless criminal syndicates—The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a suspenseful puzzle mystery, a captivating romance, and an affecting portrait of a young woman in search of a meaningful life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593536179
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/23/2024
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	162,742
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.03(d)

About the Author

JULIET GRAMES is the best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Real Simple, Parade, and The Boston Globe, and she is the recipient of an Ellery Queen Award from the Mystery Writers of America. She is editorial director at Soho Press in New York.

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/01/2024

Grames (The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna) shines in this intriguing story of buried secrets in an isolated Southern Italian village. Narrator Francesca Loftfield, a 20-something American woman, arrives in the early 1960s as a charity worker. She wryly calls herself a “bluestocking with big dreams for building a better world, one needy child at a time,” and has come to Santa Chionia to establish a nursery school that would help reduce the high child mortality rates by providing nutritious meals for its pupils and educating their families about hygiene. Soon after her arrival, a flood unearths human remains from underneath the town’s post office. The skeleton was not recently buried, and most of the locals seem indifferent to the grim find. Francesca’s curiosity is stoked, though, when she’s approached by Emilia Volonta, the priest’s housekeeper, who suspects that the bones belonged to her son, Leo, who went missing after he supposedly emigrated to the U.S. as a teen, 40 years earlier. Francesca agrees to Emilia’s simple request—to determine if the town’s records include a visa for Leo. Her inquiry proves only the beginning of the matter, however. From the prologue, readers already know that Francesca will find evidence of “cold-blooded murder,” and the suspense is heightened when a second woman asks Francesca to ascertain if the remains belong instead to her missing husband. Grames excels at rendering the experiences of living as a stranger in a close-knit community, where justice is meted out extrajudicially, and she manages to keep the reader guessing as to the truth about who was murdered and why. This is a superior literary mystery. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Co. (July)

Publishers Weekly

As a mystery, Grames’s novel is as gripping as they come; it’s also a deeply satisfying character study of an outsider learning more about a place than she’d bargained for.”
—Publishers Weekly (Best of Summer, Staff Pick)
 
“A beautiful novel, filled with riches, not the least of which are its evocative setting in the Calabrian hills, and its cast of vivid characters, large and small, who will stay with you long after you’ve turned the final page.”
—Dan Fesperman, author of Winter Work

“Grames shines in this intriguing story of buried secrets in an isolated Southern Italian village . . . She excels at rendering the experiences of living as a stranger in a close-knit community . . . and she manages to keep the reader guessing as to the truth about who was murdered and why. This is a superior literary mystery.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)

From the Publisher