Books
Barry R. Willis’s New Book Traces the Pony Express and Its Costs on the Frontier
Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk
Author Barry R. Willis has published "The Legacy of the Pony Express: True Tales from the Old West," a history of the short-lived mail relay service that has become one of the enduring symbols of the American frontier. The book is published through Covenant Books.
The Pony Express ran for about eighteen months beginning in 1860, carrying mail across roughly 1,900 miles between Missouri and California before the transcontinental telegraph made it obsolete. Willis’s account draws on primary sources, period writings and firsthand testimonies to reconstruct the riders’ journeys across mountains and plains, according to the announcement.
The book doesn’t stop at the riders themselves. According to the publisher, Willis places their exploits inside the larger story of westward expansion, including its toll on Native American communities, and examines how economic pressure, political ambition and individual risk-taking intersected during the period. The narrative also touches on wagon trains and the gold rushes that drew settlers west alongside the mail route.
"The stories of these riders and the era they inhabited deserve to be told with honesty and depth," Willis said in the announcement. "By presenting multiple perspectives — including the often-silenced voices of Native Americans — we can better understand both the achievements and moral complexities of our frontier heritage."
Willis has previously written on American musical heritage, a background the publisher says informs his approach to historical narrative here. "The Legacy of the Pony Express" is available in hardcover and as an e-book through major retailers including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books and Google Play.
Studio CarryOnHarry is always glad to see frontier history get the fuller, more complicated treatment — the Pony Express makes for a good story, but the context around it is where the real history lives.
Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.
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Rick Larnerd has published a new novel, "The Mystery of Gasparilla Bay," a crime story set on Florida’s Gulf Coast that pairs a present-day poaching case with the region’s pirate lore, according to the publisher’s announcement. The book is out now through Covenant Books, available in bookstores and through major online retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books.
At the story’s center is Andy Warden, an experienced Florida conservation officer who pursues Bart Thibodeaux, an alligator poacher, through Florida’s swamps and Gulf Coast backwaters. According to the publisher’s description, Thibodeaux’s crimes take a darker turn when he takes a vacationing mother and her two children hostage during a treasure hunt of their own — one tied to the buried fortune of nineteenth-century pirate Jose Gaspar, whose legend has long drawn treasure hunters to the area. The description frames the story as one built on the question of whether the woman he’s underestimated will turn the tables on him, and whether Warden can close the case before it’s too late.
Larnerd’s own background runs close to his protagonist’s. He spent thirty-one years in law enforcement, including service as a wildlife officer in both Pennsylvania and Tennessee, and eight years as police chief in his Tennessee hometown, according to the announcement. He also served as an active-duty infantryman in the military. The publisher’s materials describe that record as the basis for the procedural detail in the novel, particularly the conservation officer’s perspective on poaching and the backcountry terrain where it plays out.
"I wanted to blend the romance of pirate legend with the reality of modern-day conservation challenges," Larnerd said in the announcement, adding that the aim was a story that "keeps readers on the edge of their seats while honoring both history and the natural world."
"The Mystery of Gasparilla Bay" is published through Covenant Books. Larnerd has said on social media that the book has already drawn its first reader review, which he described as encouraging.
Studio CarryOnHarry is always interested in writers who put a working career on the page rather than research alone — a three-decade law enforcement record is the kind of detail that tends to show up in a book’s texture, not just its marketing copy.
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Joe Reina has published a new novel, "Shadows over Scottsdale: An Unsolved Murder Mystery," built around a scenario true-crime statistics make uncomfortably familiar: a man commits a devastating crime and simply disappears, leaving investigators and a grieving community with no resolution.
The book follows a character named Robert, who flees the country using forged documents and a cargo ship after an act of destruction that leaves behind, as the publisher describes it, charred remains and an unanswered investigation. The case goes cold. The novel, according to its publisher, is less concerned with the mechanics of the escape than with what happens afterward, to the people left waiting for answers that never come.
Reina, now retired in Scottsdale, spent decades in international business across apparel, footwear, and real estate, with extensive time in Europe and a particular connection to Italy that shaped two earlier books, "The Goat Sleeps in the Kitchen" and "A Love Affair in Tuscany." "Shadows over Scottsdale" marks a different direction, built instead around the real scale of unsolved homicide in the U.S. The publisher’s materials cite roughly 346,000 unsolved homicides since 1965, with more than a dozen occurring unresolved each day. Separate reporting on the book has cited a figure of about 7,778 murders in 2023 alone, which it similarly frames as more than a dozen a day going unresolved.
"Writing ‘Shadows over Scottsdale’ forced me to confront uncomfortable questions about justice itself," Reina said, according to the announcement. "Too many crimes go unsolved, too many families wait endlessly for answers. I wanted readers to understand that behind every cold case statistic is a real story, real suffering, and real questions that may never be answered."
The publisher positions the novel as an examination of institutional limits as much as a crime story: the toll of a case gone cold on the people who can’t move past it, and what it means for a community when accountability simply never arrives.
"Shadows over Scottsdale" is published by Covenant Books and is available in paperback and hardcover through the publisher’s website and major retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books.
Cold-case statistics tend to get cited and then forgotten. Studio CarryOnHarry is curious whether fiction built directly around that number does more to stick with a reader than the number alone ever does.
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