The Jackal’s Mistress

In this Civil War love story,inspired by a real-life friendship across enemy linesthe wife of a missing Confederate soldier discovers a wounded Yankee officer and must decide what she’s willing to risk for the life of a strangerfrom the New York Times bestselling author of such acclaimed historical fiction as Hour of the Witch and The Sandcastle Girls. Virginia1864–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 nightfearing him dead in a Union prison campher days are spent running a gristmill with her teenage niecea hired handand his wifeall the grain they can produce requisitioned by the Confederate Army. It’s an uneasy life in the Shenandoah Valleythe territory frequently changing handscontrol swinging back and forth like a pendulum between North and Southand 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 housethe bones of his hand and leg shattered. Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the Vermont Brigade is her enemy – but he’s also a human beingand 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 succeedsdoes she try to secretly bring him across Union lineswhere she might negotiate a trade for news of her own husband? A vivid and sweeping story of two people navigating the boundaries of love and humanity in a landscape of brutal violenceThe Jackal’s Mistress is a heart-stopping new novelbased on a largely unknown piece of American historyfrom one of our greatest storytellers.