For nine decades, Karen Tintori’s ancestors had fiercely guarded the family’s secret. Then, a genealogical query by Tintori unearthed the name of a great-aunt that had mysteriously vanished from her family tree. In “Unto the Daughters: The Legacy of an Honor Killing,” Tintori traces her family’s immigrant Sicilian roots and, along the way, discovers Frances Costa, her grandmother’s sister, who was brutally murdered by her own brothers in a 1920 honor killing in Detroit. “This was something that was buried, hidden and changed so many times to protect the guilty and the innocent,” said Tintori, who read from her book as part of the John D. Calandra Italian-American Institute’s Writers Read Series at Queens College.
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