- September 9, 2026
Ginger Pinholster, author of "Snakes of St. Augustine," will celebrate the launch of her latest novel, "The Train to Santa Fe," with an event at Fern & Fable in Ormond Beach on Friday, Sept. 4 at 7 p.m.
She will be in conversation with fellow author Jessica Handler and refreshments will be available. The event is free and open to the public.
"The Train to Santa Fe," released Aug. 25 from Regal House Publishing, tells a multi-generational story about family, culture, and healing, set in the desert Southwest. Chenoa, a young Native American potter, boards a brand new train line from Española, New Mexico, to Santa Fe in the late 1800s, setting in motion events that reverberate into the future.
In contemporary Santa Fe, Jonah is a nursing home orderly trying to keep custody of his son during the dissolution of a previous relationship. At work, his friend, Rose, is desperate to prove her heritage before dying. Jemi, a divorced veteran healing in more ways than one from an explosion in Afghanistan is obsessed with returning to where she felt safe and secure as a girl. When she reaches out to Jonah on a dating app, hoping that he’ll become her hiking partner, they begin a journey that collides with the past and offers hope for healing generational wounds.
Pinholster is also the author of the 2020 Royal Palm Award runner-up, "City in a Forest." A longtime resident of Ponce Inlet and former science writer, she is active in the sea turtle conservation community. Writing "The Train to Santa Fe" brought her from the beaches to the desert.
How that happened, Pinholster said, “I could tell you that I had become fascinated by the technical challenge of writing a braided historical novel, with rotating points of view, spanning several time periods. That’s the truth, but it’s not the whole truth. What really happened was that I went on a work trip to Santa Fe, where I met and fell in love with a handsome cowboy.”
Pinholster now divides her time between her home in Florida and Santa Fe and is currently at work on a novel about the women behind sea turtle conservation in Florida.
