Author Talk: Juliet Grames and "The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia" (NWL)

One unidentified skeleton. Three missing men. A village full of secrets. The best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna, Juliet Grames, a Farmington Valley native, will discuss her new novel, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia, the story of a young American woman turned amateur detective in a small village in Southern Italy in 1960 (“Terrific” –Boston Globe).

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.

Juliet Grames is the national and international bestselling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna and The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia. Her debut novel was shortlisted for the New England Book Award and the Connecticut Book Award, and received Italy’s Premio Cetraro for contribution to Southern Italian literature. It has been translated into nine languages. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Best American Mystery & Suspense, Real Simple, Parade, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and the Boston Globe, among other venues.

Grames was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised in the Farmington Valley. She attended Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford and graduated Magna Cum Laude from Columbia College with a degree in history before embarking on a career in book publishing. Since 2010 she has worked at Soho Press, where she is Editorial Director. In 2022, she was the recipient of the Mystery Writers of America Ellery Queen Award for her editorial work in the crime fiction genre. She lives in New England