If you’re a fan of romance novels as well as horse stories, you may find Marilyn Holdsworth’s Pegasus to your liking.
Hannah, a young, attractive widow, is a journalist whose forte is exposing animal abuse. When she meets widowed attorney Winston Caulfield III, she discovers that they share much more in common than the loss of their spouses.
Win decides to help Hannah in her efforts to save wild horses from slaughter. This results in a visit to a BLM wild horse adoption center where the actions of the workers rouse the couple’s suspicions. Told to return the next day to adopt several horses, they do so, only to find the office locked and the wranglers hostile and abusive to the horses they’re driving off the range into pens.
Win and Hannah manage to stop the killing of one badly injured horse, load it into their trailer and haul it back to Win’s ranch. This is Pegasus, who becomes the focus of the story.
Hannah balances her writing about puppy mills with nursing the injured horse back to health, unraveling the mystery of his identity, and finding out what’s really going on at the wild horse adoption center. In the process, the relationship between her and Win deepens.
The bad guy of the tale, Vince Rossi, is predictably despicable and the people who work for him are sniveling creatures who fear the boss’s violent temper and see horses as nothing more than a way to turn a quick, illegal profit.
“I wrote the book because I am deeply concerned about the exploitation and abuse of horses,” says Holdsworth, who lives with her husband in southern California. “I wanted to make people aware and gain their support in the fight against this maltreatment.”
Pegasus, an oversized paperback self-published through AuthorHouse, is available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble for $14.95 plus shipping and handling.
