A list of the top 15 mystery hardcover bestsellers for the week ending August 27th, 2010 has been posted on the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books website.
Quite a few changes on the list this week, though The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson once again sets at the top. Two titles that debuted just off the list and one new title enter the top 15.
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Moving from 17 to 5 is the seventh mystery featuring Russian police investigator Arkady Renko, Three Stations by Martin Cruz Smith.
Though he has been technically suspended from the prosecutor’s office for once again turning up unpleasant truths, Renko strives to solve a last case: the death of an elegant young woman whose body is found in a construction trailer on the perimeter of Moscow’s main rail hub. It looks like a simple drug overdose to everyone—except to Renko, whose examination of the crime scene turns up some inexplicable clues, most notably an invitation to Russia’s premier charity ball, the billionaires’ Nijinksy Fair. Thus a sordid death becomes interwoven with the lifestyles of Moscow’s rich and famous, many of whom are clinging to their cash in the face of Putin’s crackdown on the very oligarchs who placed him in power. Renko uncovers a web of death, money, madness and a kidnapping that threatens the woman he is coming to love and the lives of children he is desperate to protect.
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Also moving up, this time from 19 to 13, is the fourth and final collaboration between Dick Francis and his son Felix, Crossfire. Francis died earlier this year.
Shell-shocked and missing a foot-lost to an IED during his tour of duty in Afghanistan, Captain Tom Forsyth has been sent "home" by the army and, at loose ends, returns to his estranged mother's house for the first time since he joined up at seventeen. But Josephine Kauri, the "first lady of British racing," has always put the horses she trains first and her family last. Tom soon finds himself strained to the breaking point with his mother and stepfather.
But there's another reason for the stifling tension at Kauri House Stables: Josephine is being blackmailed for a hefty sum every week-and forced to make her horses lose. Retirement is not an option, as she has been warned that it will result in the thing she most fears: exposure and ridicule ... and prison, when the government finds out what she's been hiding.
Tom sets out to discover and defeat this hidden enemy using his finely honed military skills. But can he save his mother's reputation and career, or will he find himself caught in the cross fire?
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New this week and debuting in the 14th spot is the thirteenth mystery in the Temperance Brennan series (from which the television series Bones is adapted), Spider Bones by Kathy Reichs.
John Lowery was declared dead in 1968—the victim of a Huey crash in Vietnam, his body buried long ago in North Carolina. Four decades later, Temperance Brennan is called to the scene of a drowning in Hemmingford, Quebec. The victim appears to have died while in the midst of a bizarre sexual practice. The corpse is later identified as John Lowery. But how could Lowery have died twice, and how did an American soldier end up in Canada?
Tempe sets off for the answer, exhuming Lowery’s grave in North Carolina and taking the remains to Hawaii for reanalysis—to the headquarters of JPAC, the U.S. military’s Joint POW/ MIA Accounting Command, which strives to recover Americans who have died in past conflicts. In Hawaii, Tempe is joined by her colleague and ex-lover Detective Andrew Ryan (how “ex” is he?) and by her daughter, who is recovering from her own tragic loss. Soon another set of remains is located, with Lowery’s dog tags tangled among them. Three bodies—all identified as Lowery.
And then Tempe is contacted by Hadley Perry, Honolulu’s flamboyant medical examiner, who needs help identifying the remains of an adolescent boy found offshore. Was he the victim of a shark attack? Or something much more sinister?
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The top four mystery bestsellers this week are shown below:
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