Timothy Dang.

The idea came up after the death of John T. Donovan, an old friend who owned a car wash and restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Donovan’s wife, Irene, was a good cook — she and her husband, Jack, were renowned for the quality of their cooking — and she was proud that Tamerlan’s wife, a woman named Shazad Latif, was an expert cook.

“I asked John,” Dang recalled, “about some food and he said ‘Shazad would be the great woman’ and I said, ‘Well, who is Shazad Latif? I’d like to know who Shazad Latif is.’ He went into this little history of the family.”

In Dang’s mind’s eye, he remembered an enormous picture of Latif standing under a tree, her head in her hands, looking like the ancient Buddha.

Dang remembered it well. So he went back to his office, grabbed his daughter’s notebook, a folder and a pen, and began to write down Latif’s life story. No one else would help — a senior police official would have gotten Dang fired if he realized his family name was on the list, but Dang knew that he was just doing good work if the cops in the future took his name seriously.

“I think in the eyes of her family and her husband and that was the extent of her reputation,” Dang said. “Now I look at her and I find a really wonderful, loving person in this world.”

And when Latif’s mother noticed his work, she told him that “I think you have the right man because Shazad used to tell me that,” Dang said.

Latif died at 55 in her home on April 26.

After her death, Dang knew that he had hit a nerve. For the next two weeks, he worked for hours upon hours and days upon days on the book. From there, he returned to Manhattan and started posting his work on the Internet — a process that took him about six months. He even posted the same story on his Facebook page, where it got about 2,000 likes and 10,000 comments.

When he got home from work, he read his story on an Eastern Shore radio station and in the local paper. Within hours, people from all over Manhattan began contacting him.