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Week of January 12, 2026

Paperback releases for the week of January 12th include THE JACKAL'S MISTRESS by Chris Bohjalian, a heart-stopping novel about the wife of a missing Confederate soldier who discovers a wounded Yankee officer and must decide what she’s willing to risk for the life of a stranger; THE JFK CONSPIRACY, in which Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch tell the true yet little-known story about the first assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy, right before his inauguration; BROOKE SHIELDS IS NOT ALLOWED TO GET OLD, an intimate and empowering exploration of aging from Brooke Shields and Rachel Bertsche that flips the script on the idea of what it means for a woman to grow older; Kira Jane Buxton's TARTUFO, a fantastically funny story featuring a cast of colorful characters in a dying Italian village --- and a giant truffle that changes their fate forever; and the paperback original WOMAN DOWN by Colleen Hoover, a twisty thriller about a frustrated author who looks for her muse in a remote hideaway, but what she finds defies all expectations...and reality.

Chris Bohjalian, author of The Jackal's Mistress

Virginia, 1864. Libby Steadman’s husband has been away for so long that she can barely conjure his voice in her dreams. While she longs for him in the night, fearing him dead in a Union prison camp, her days are spent running a gristmill with her teenage niece, a hired hand and his wife. It’s an uneasy life in the Shenandoah Valley, and Libby awakens every morning expecting to see her land a battlefield. And then she finds a gravely injured Union officer left for dead in a neighbor’s house. Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the Vermont Brigade is her enemy --- but he’s also a human being, and Libby must make a terrible decision: Does she leave him to die alone? Or does she risk treason and try to nurse him back to health? And if she succeeds, does she try to secretly bring him across Union lines, where she might negotiate a trade for news of her own husband?