Josefina's Honor

Book excerpt: Just a blurb at the bottom of the sports page of the Daily News, a piece about four lines long, said, "Boxer Jerry Flowers and his acknowledged paramour found dead in his estranged wife's Brooklyn apartment. Police are terming the deaths a 'murder-suicide.'" No other details mentioned the bizarre circumstances surrounding the affair. Nothing told of the passions, the love, hate,sex and superstitions that twisted the case from start to finish. The murderer left a trail a mile wide. The police could have followed the trail except for the relationship that developed between the "wronged widow" and the precinct police chief. The case closed very quickly. But not the repercussions that reached into all the families involved -- into the next generation and beyond. Did the death of the lovers satify the killer? Was there punishment for the crime? Who paid the Piper? The tale winds from the streets of a small Italian hamlet to a Brooklyn neighborhood with the feel of a village. We meet people of differing cultures and customs that play a strong role in the lives and deaths. Right to the end.