Pomp and Circumspect

Mike Pompeo, who served as CIA director and secretary of state in the Trump administration, has the #4 book in the country with the memoir Never Give an Inch. Aspiring presidential candidates often test the waters with a political memoir; the Washington Post, in its most recent bimonthly ranking of the 10 candidates it deems mostly likely to be the Republican nominee, had Pompeo at #7, though he, like everyone else except for the president he served under, has yet to declare. The Post’s likeliest Republican candidate, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, has a memoir coming out at the end of the month: The Courage to Be Free.

Mass Appeal

Mass market paperbacks represent a fraction of the market—4% of sales in 2022. Still, the format has its stalwart authors and fans, and this week sees a couple of newer faces join the list’s more familiar names. Pamela Desmond Wright, who wrote paranormals and romances for years under a pseudonym, began publishing under her own name in 2021 with The Cowboy’s Amish Haven, which has sold more than 12K print copies. Her third Amish romance, The Amish Bachelor’s Bride, lands at #7 on our mass market list. At #10, the Christian romantic suspense novel Ranch Under Fire is Tina Wheeler’s debut.“For those of you who have the same dream of writing for Harlequin, don’t give up,” Wheeler wrote on her blog. “Continue to learn your craft and write, write, write.”

Royalty Statement

Prince Harry’s Spare sits at the top of the list for the third week in a row, besting the #2 book, Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us, by more than 20K print units. Courtiers by Valentine Low, royal correspondent for the Times, may be pretty far down in the line of succession—it debuts at #10 on our hardcover nonfiction list—but with lines like “Harry looked like a sulky teenager, forced against his will to talk to some unwelcome visitors” (written about the prince at age 34), it’s not afraid to punch up.

NEW & NOTABLE

THE BULLET GARDEN
Stephen Hunter
#20 Hardcover Fiction
“Hunter’s superb fourth Earl Swagger novel details the sniper’s origin story,” per our starred review, beginning at the military installation at Parris Island, S.C., in 1944. “Terrific writing, amusing literary references, fascinating gun lore, and intense action scenes help make this one of Hunter’s best.”

RECOVERY ROAD
Christine Feehan
#1 Mass Market
This is book 8 in Feehan’s Torpedo Ink paranormal romance series, about a motorcycle club whose members survived childhood torture in Russia and who now, according to the book’s first chapter, spend “a good deal of their time hunting pedophiles and those running human trafficking rings.”