A list of the top 15 mystery hardcover bestsellers for the week ending May 15, 2009 has been posted on the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books website.
Last week's featured bestseller, Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris, made the biggest move this week landing in the second spot behind First Family by David Baldacci. A debut mystery that just missed the cutoff last week edges up a few notches.
The widely praised The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley moves into 12th position this week. It is the summer of 1950—and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that 11-year-old Flavia de Luce calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.” To Flavia the investigation is the stuff of science: full of possibilities, contradictions, and connections. Soon her father, a man raising his three daughters alone, is seized, accused of murder. And in a police cell, during a violent thunderstorm, Colonel de Luce tells his daughter an astounding story—of a schoolboy friendship turned ugly, of a priceless object that vanished in a bizarre and brazen act of thievery, of a Latin teacher who flung himself to his death from the school’s tower thirty years before. Now Flavia is armed with more than enough knowledge to tie two distant deaths together, to examine new suspects, and begin a search that will lead her all the way to the King of England himself. Of this much the girl is sure: her father is innocent of murder—but protecting her and her sisters from something even worse. Mysterious Reviews calls the book a "well paced story, written with Dickensian flair, Sherlockian suspense and tongue-in-cheek fun" adding, "[i]t's a 5-star performance for young and old, and well worth applauding." (MBN note: Read the full text at Review of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley.)
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The top four mystery bestsellers this week are shown below:
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