Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Rick Larnerd has published a new novel, "The Mystery of Gasparilla Bay," that sets a present-day Florida conservation story against the backdrop of the Jose Gaspar pirate legend. The book is out now through Covenant Books, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and the Apple iTunes Store.

The novel follows Andy Warden, a Florida conservation officer, as he tracks an alligator poacher named Bart Thibodeaux through the state’s backwaters and bayous. According to the publisher, Thibodeaux’s pursuit of illegal game takes a dangerous turn when he takes a vacationing mother and her two children hostage while she is treasure hunting along the Gulf Coast, a decision that sets the novel’s central chase in motion. The story threads in the real history of Jose Gaspar, the early nineteenth-century pirate whose reputed buried treasure along Florida’s Gulf Coast has drawn hunters and storytellers for generations.

Larnerd’s own background runs close to his protagonist’s. He spent thirty-one years in law enforcement, working as a wildlife officer in both Pennsylvania and Tennessee before serving eight years as chief of police in his Tennessee hometown. He also served as an active-duty infantryman. The publisher’s materials describe that experience as shaping the novel’s depiction of conservation work and the people who do it.

"I wanted to blend the romance of pirate legend with the reality of modern-day conservation challenges," Larnerd said, according to the announcement. "The result is a story that keeps readers on the edge of their seats while honoring both history and the natural world."

The book is published through Covenant Books, a Christian publishing house. Larnerd has said on social media that the novel has already drawn its first reader review, though he did not detail its contents.

Studio CarryOnHarry sees a natural hook here: a work authored by someone with thirty years of real law enforcement experience brings distinctive credibility to its fictional conservation officer protagonist than most adventure fiction manages.

Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.

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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.

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