Flying Light

A groundbreaking work on the Pony Express, a new biography on Ned Christie, a compendium of Western lawmen, and two vastly different and original fictional interpretations of the ill-fated Donner Party.

- Stuart Rosebrook

Historians of the American West have written dozens of books on trailblazers and overland trails in the past six decades, but Jim DeFelice’s West Like Lightning: The Brief, Legendary Ride of the Pony Express (William Morrow, $27.99) is the first comprehensive history of the legendary transcontinental experiment in mail delivery in sixty years. DeFelice, the New York Times bestselling author of American Sniper, has applied his professional research skills with his popular style of story-telling to produce a fast-paced history of one of the most dramatized Old West entrepreneurial efforts in communications history, and its founder William H. Russell.