Scottsdale Author Joe Reina’s New Novel Follows a Killer Who Gets Away With It

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

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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