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Brown Bag Book Club Winter/Spring 2026 |
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A killer is preying on sacred ground.... In the sleepy rural town of Painters Mill, Ohio, the Amish and English residents have lived side by side for two centuries. But sixteen years ago, a series of brutal murders shattered the peaceful farming community. In the aftermath of the violence, the town was left with a sense of fragility, a loss of innocence. Kate Burkholder, a young Amish girl, survived the terror of the Slaughterhouse Killer but came away from its brutality with the realization that she no longer belonged with the Amish. Now, a wealth of experience later, Kate has been asked to return to Painters Mill as Chief of Police. Her Amish roots and big city law enforcement background make her the perfect candidate. She's certain she's come to terms with her past--until the first body is discovered in a snowy field. Kate vows to stop the killer before he strikes again. But to do so, she must betray both her family and her Amish past--and expose a dark secret that could destroy her. |
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Wed, Feb 11 @ 12:30 pm
After her plane crashes, a seventeen-year-old girl spends eleven days walking through the Peruvian jungle. Against all odds, with no food, shelter, or equipment, she gets out. A better-equipped group of adult survivors of the same crash sits down and dies. What makes the difference?Examining such stories of miraculous endurance and tragic death--how people get into trouble and how they get out again (or not)--Deep Survival takes us from the tops of snowy mountains and the depths of oceans to the workings of the brain that control our behavior. Through close analysis of case studies, Laurence Gonzales describes the stages of survival and reveals the essence of a survivor--truths that apply not only to surviving in the wild but also to surviving life-threatening illness, relationships, the death of a loved one, running a business during uncertain times, and even war. In the end, he finds, it is what's in your heart, not what's in your pack, that separates the living from the dead.Fascinating and absolutely essential for anyone who hikes in the woods, this book will change the way we understand ourselves and the great outdoors. |
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Wed, Mar 11 @ 12:30 pm
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER - #1 BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER - USA TODAY BESTSELLER - In this Civil War love story, inspired by a real-life friendship across enemy lines, the 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 stranger, from the New York Times bestselling author of such acclaimed historical fiction as Hour of the Witch and The Sandcastle Girls. 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, all the grain they can produce requisitioned by the Confederate Army. It's an uneasy life in the Shenandoah Valley, the territory frequently changing hands, control swinging back and forth like a pendulum between North and South, 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, the bones of his hand and leg shattered. 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? A vivid and sweeping story of two people navigating the boundaries of love and humanity in a landscape of brutal violence, The Jackal's Mistress is a heart-stopping new novel, based on a largely unknown piece of American history, from one of our greatest storytellers. |
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Wed, Apr 8 @ 12:30 pm
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK - A stunning debut from an award-winning writer, about loss, isolation, folklore, and the joy and dissonance of finding oneself by exploring life outside one's community Whale Fall is a powerful novel, written with a calm, luminous precision, each feeling rendered with chiseled care, the drama of island life unfolding with piercing emotional accuracy. --Colm Toibin, New York Times bestselling author of Long Island In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations. The arrival of two English ethnographers who hope to study the island culture, then, feels like a boon to her--both a glimpse of life outside her community and a means of escape. The longer the ethnographers stay, the more she feels herself pulled towards them, reckoning with a sensual awakening inside herself, despite her misgivings that her community is being misconstrued and exoticized. With shimmering prose tempered by sharp wit, Whale Fall tells the story of what happens when one person's ambitions threaten the fabric of a community, and what can happen when they are realized. O'Connor paints a portrait of a community and a woman on the precipice, forced to confront an outside world that seems to be closing in on them. |
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Wed, May 13 @ 12:30 pm
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER New York Times bestselling author Kristin Harmel returns with a dazzling diamond of a novel (Hazel Gaynor, New York Times bestselling author of Before Dorothy) about two jewel thieves, a priceless bracelet that disappears in 1940s Paris, and a quest for answers in a decades-old murder. Colette Marceau has been stealing jewels for nearly as long as she can remember, following the centuries-old code of honor instilled in her by her mother, Annabel: take only from the cruel and unkind, and give to those in need. Never was their family tradition more important than seven decades earlier, during the Second World War, when Annabel and Colette worked side by side in Paris to fund the French Resistance. But one night in 1942, it all went wrong. Annabel was arrested by the Germans, and Colette's four-year-old sister, Liliane, disappeared in the chaos of the raid, along with an exquisite diamond bracelet sewn into the hem of her nightgown for safekeeping. Soon after, Annabel was executed, and Liliane's body was found floating in the Seine--but the bracelet was nowhere to be found. Seventy years later, Colette--who has redistributed $30 million in jewels over the decades to fund many worthy organizations--has done her best to put her tragic past behind her, but her life begins to unravel when the long-missing bracelet suddenly turns up in a museum exhibit in Boston. If Colette can discover where it has been all this time--and who owns it now--she may finally learn the truth about what happened to her sister. But she isn't the only one for whom the bracelet holds answers, and when someone from her childhood lays claim to the diamonds, she's forced to confront the ghosts of her past as never before. Against all odds, there may still be a chance to bring a murderer to justice--but first, Colette will have to summon the courage to open her own battered heart. |
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Wed, Jun 10 @ 12:30 pm
An Instant New York Times Bestseller From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry's relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth--its abundance of sweet, juicy berries--to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency. As Elizabeth Gilbert writes, Robin Wall Kimmerer is a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world. The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times, and a reminder that hoarding won't save us, all flourishing is mutual. Robin Wall Kimmerer is donating her advance payments from this book as a reciprocal gift, back to the land, for land protection, restoration, and justice. |
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