Mystery Bestsellers for the Week Ending May 18, 2012

A list of the top 15 mystery hardcover bestsellers for the week ending May 18th, 2012 has been posted by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books.

The 12th "Southern Vampire" mystery Deadlocked by Charlaine Harris retains the top spot on the list this week.

Two new titles debut.

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Entering the list at number 8 is the new Lucas Davenport mystery, Stolen Prey by John Sandford.

Lucas Davenport has seen many terrible murder scenes. This is one of the worst. In the small Minnesota town of Deephaven, an entire family has been killed — husband, wife, two daughters, dogs.

There's something about the scene that pokes at Lucas's cop instincts — it looks an awful lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he's seen in drug killings sometimes. But this is a seriously upscale town, and the husband was an executive vice president at a big bank. It just doesn't seem to fit.

Until it does. And where it leads Lucas will take him into the darkest nightmare of his life.

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Two places lower at number 10 is the new stand-along thriller, The Columbus Affair by Steve Berry.

Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Tom Sagan has written hard-hitting articles from hot spots around the world. But when a controversial report from a war-torn region is exposed as a fraud, his professional reputation crashes and burns. Now he lives in virtual exile — haunted by bad decisions and the shocking truth he can never prove: that his downfall was a deliberate act of sabotage by an unknown enemy. But before Sagan can end his torment with the squeeze of a trigger, fate intervenes in the form of an enigmatic stranger with a request that cannot be ignored.

Zachariah Simon has the look of a scholar, the soul of a scoundrel, and the zeal of a fanatic. He also has Tom Sagan's estranged daughter at his mercy. Simon desperately wants something only Sagan can supply: the key to a 500-year-old mystery, a treasure with explosive political significance in the modern world. For both Simon and Sagan the stakes are high, the goal intensely personal, the consequences of opposing either man potentially catastrophic. On a perilous quest from Florida to Vienna to Prague and finally to the mountains of Jamaica, the two men square off in a dangerous game. Along the way, both of their lives will be altered — and everything we know about Christopher Columbus will change.

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