For Fans of "The Godfather" and Scorsese's Upcoming "Midnight Vendetta" - Blog Tour and Book Excerpt for "Cobblestones: a New Orleans Tragedy"

AMAZON BEST SELLING BOOK IN 19th Century Historical Fiction Category!!

BOOK EXCERPT:

From Chapter 1

Bisacquino, Sicily

June 1, 1889

6:10 AM

From his first breath, he became eligible for death, but nothing impaled his mortal existence more, than the murder of his best friend. For on this day, the young Sicilian contandini began his mournful morning with dreadful thoughts. The misty dawn coiled him in a flint-gray shroud, which reminded him of the fragility of life—his and others. As the shards of sunlight beamed through the narrow alleys and streets of his mountain village, he knew his innocence, and his humble life’s tillage in the undulating soil on the green hills of his family’s olive groves and grape-ladened vineyards, were changing with every fleeting step. Even the air he breathed stung his senses with a tomb-like stench.

The clopping hooves of a solitary black horse on the ancient cobblestone streets echoed against the old tan and yellow stucco homes and shops that framed the Piazza Triona. The horse needed no guidance, as it had made this trip many times. It needed no stinging whip to force him to tug the black lacquered hearse up the hill towards the yawning doors of St. John the Baptist Church, where a French Jesuit, Jacque Fontebuis, waited with his hands clasped around his Missal for the Requiem Mass.

As the undertaker, Vincenzo Trambatore, stomped on the hearse’s wooden brakes, Father Fontebuis nodded his head and doffed his black Biretta. The undertaker silently removed his black coppola and nodded. Across the piazza, a lamplighter extinguished the village’s lamps. For a moment, those were the only men near the church, but that was about to change.

As Father Fontebuis and the undertaker approached the rear doors of the hearse, their funereal countenance was diverted to the hobnail thumping of young peasant’s boots against one of Bisacquino’s six hundred-year-old cobblestone streets, leading down from the outskirts of town to the piazza. The young peasant, Antonio Carravella, panting from his run, slowly approached the priest and the undertaker. He stopped and looked past the priest and through the oval glass doors of the hearse. He took one step closer, and snatched his brown coppola and placed it over his heart.