A mysterious body is just one adventure the narrator encounters in ‘The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia’

Imagine Italy and your mind might run to Renaissance art and ancient ruins. Piazzas and porticoes. Sunshine, spritzes and espresso.

A dramatically different version of the country awaits readers of Juliet Grames’ new “The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia,” one equally captivating but far more unsettling and perilous. The titular village, population 1,800, is perched high in the Aspromonte region of Calabria in the toe of Italy’s boot.

When Francesca Loftfield arrives in September 1960, the village residents are living in “medieval stone houses tessellated directly into the cliffs,” most without plumbing or electricity. The community also suffers a child mortality rate of more than 40%. That’s partly what Francesca, or Franca as she’s called by locals, hopes to alleviate by opening a nursery school for kids and providing “hygienic education” — like why chickens shouldn’t live in the house — to adults.

Soon after her arrival, the village becomes even more inaccessible, as flooding washes out the only inbound bridge and — cue the eerie music — unearths a body buried beneath the post office.

The 27-year-old Franca, who narrates from the present, works for Child Rescue, a job she acquired in Rome after leaving her husband. She’s precocious and a bit repressed, having enrolled at Barnard when she was 16, followed by Oxford, where she “had no sex.”

She met Sandro during a rainstorm while working toward her doctorate in Venice and leaped into bed, then marriage at 22, after a brief but passionate affair. When Franca suffered a late-term miscarriage, her relationship crumbled, but her marriage persisted because 1950s Italy didn’t permit divorce.

She hasn’t seen Sandro for 18 months when the novel opens, but her sorrow remains raw. Despite growing up in Philadelphia, Franca feels connected to Santa Chionia through her Calabrian mother, but she steadily alienates potential allies after agreeing to help two women look into missing relatives who may have emigrated or may have ended up below the post office.

Her lone friend, most of the time, is her 70-year-old landlady Cicca, who knows everything about her hometown and even receives regular advice from a long-dead sister. Arrayed against Franca — in her mind, if not necessarily in reality — are a host of antagonists who thwart her informal investigation into the exhumed skeleton and sabotage her efforts to open the nursery: black-eyed, “voluptuously willowy” Isodiana; unofficial but universally acknowledged power brokers Don Tito and Donna Potenziana; and a sexy priest with decidedly unsexy ideas on marriage, Don Pantaleone.

Even Cicca’s gorgeous “specimen” of a nephew, Ugo, presents a potential threat given his hotness and Franca’s married-ness. Between the unidentified body and Franca’s uneasy isolation, the novel feints at being a thriller, but is more consistently the coming-of-age story of a nosy, idealistic and arrogant young woman with a well-meaning savior complex. Or as she characterizes herself, a “narrow-minded silver-spoon twit.”

She’s no antihero, but she isn’t always easy to root for, either, particularly as the novel barrels toward its mostly predictable conclusion. While Grames’ protagonist is slow to learn, her story has plenty to teach about the potential pitfalls of good intentions and the fictional Santa Chionia is an enchanting destination.

Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer.

The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia

By: Juliet Grames.

Publisher: Knopf, 416 pages, $29.