Juliet Grames reads from The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia: A Novel (Knopf, 2024)
Jo Piazza reads from The Sicilian Inheritance: A Novel (Dutton, 2024)
Camilla Trinchieri reads from The Road to Murder (Soho Crime, 2024)
Three writers present mysteries set in historical and contemporary Italy. Juliet Grames’s novel The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia begins in Calabria in 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a young American tasked with opening a nursery school, arrives in an isolated mountain village with no running water or electricity. Most troubling, receding flood waters reveal a human skeleton, but whose? Francesca begins to ask inconvenient questions; as an outsider, she might be the only person who can uncover the truth. Grames’s book is a suspenseful puzzle mystery, a captivating romance, and an affecting portrait of a young woman in search of a meaningful life. Jo Piazza’s book tells of Sara Marsala, who, following the failures of her business and marriage and the death of her beloved Aunt Rosie, travels to Sicily. There she learns that her great-grandmother Serafina, thought to have died of illness, is suspected to have been murdered. In her attempt to find the truth, she learns the story of her ancestor. The Sicilian Inheritance is at once an immersive multigenerational mystery and an ode to the undaunted heroism of everyday women. Camilla Trinchieri’s The Road to Murder follows Nico Doyle, a former NYPD detective who, after the death of his wife, has settled into a new life in Gravigna, Italy. The locals have welcomed him, he has a good job cooking in a restaurant, and a burgeoning romance is healing old wounds. One morning, Nico receives a phone call from the carabinieri: a woman has been found murdered in her home, and the sole witness speaks only English. Nico and the police chief have their hands full as they try to solve the crime and restore peace to the otherwise sleepy town.