A list of the top 15 Mystery Hardcover Bestsellers for the week ending May 16th, 2014 has been posted by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books.
No change at the top with The Target by David Baldacci remaining our number one bestseller. But lots of other changes, with five new titles entering the list — position in [brackets].
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[8]: The Son
Jo Nesbo
Sonny Lofthus is a strangely charismatic and complacent young man. Sonny's been in prison for a dozen years, nearly half his life. The inmates who seek out his uncanny abilities to soothe leave his cell feeling absolved. They don't know or care that Sonny has a serious heroin habit — or where or how he gets his uninterrupted supply of the drug. Or that he's serving time for other peoples' crimes.
Sonny took the first steps toward addiction when his father took his own life rather than face exposure as a corrupt cop. Now Sonny is the seemingly malleable center of a whole infrastructure of corruption: prison staff, police, lawyers, a desperate priest — all of them focused on keeping him high and in jail. And all of them under the thumb of the Twin, Oslo's crime overlord. As long as Sonny gets his dope, he's happy to play the criminal and the prison's in-house savior.
But when he learns a stunning, long-hidden secret concerning his father, he makes a brilliantly executed escape from prison — and from the person he'd let himself become — and begins hunting down those responsible for the crimes against him. The darkly looming question is: Who will get to him first — the criminals or the cops?
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[11]: The Skin Collector
Jeffery Deaver
— Lincoln Rhyme (11th)
The killer's methods are terrifying. He stalks the basements and underground passageways of New York City. He tattoos his victims' flesh with cryptic messages, using a tattoo gun loaded with poison, resulting in an agonizing, painful death.
When a connection is made to the Bone Collector-the serial killer who terrorized New York more than a decade ago-Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are immediately drawn into the case.
Rhyme, Sachs, and the NYPD must race against time to answer the many questions the investigation uncovers: Whom will the killer attack next? What is the message behind the victims' tattoos? Does the killer's own inking — a fanged centipede sporting a woman's face — hold any significance? And what is his ultimate mission?
As time runs out, Rhyme discovers that the past has returned to haunt him in the most troubling way imaginable.
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[13]: Any Other Name
Craig Johnson
— Walt Longmire (10th)
Walt is sinking into high-plains winter discontent when his former boss, Lucian Conally, asks him to take on a mercy case in an adjacent county. Detective Gerald Holman is dead and Lucian wants to know what drove his old friend to take his own life. With the clock ticking on the birth of his first grandchild, Walt learns that the by-the-book detective might have suppressed evidence concerning three missing women.
Digging deeper, Walt uncovers an incriminating secret so dark that it threatens to claim other lives even before the sheriff can serve justice — Wyoming style.
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[14]: The Kraken Project
Douglas Preston
— Wyman Ford (3rd)
NASA is building a probe to be splashed down in the Kraken Mare, the largest sea on Saturn's great moon, Titan. It is one of the most promising habitats for extraterrestrial life in the solar system, but the surface is unpredictable and dangerous, requiring the probe to contain artificial intelligence software. To this end, Melissa Shepherd, a brilliant programmer, has developed "Dorothy", a powerful, self-modifying AI whose true potential is both revolutionary and terrifying. When miscalculations lead to a catastrophe during testing, Dorothy flees into the internet.
Former CIA agent Wyman Ford is tapped to track down the rogue AI. As Ford and Shepherd search for Dorothy, they realize that her horrific experiences in the wasteland of the Internet have changed her in ways they can barely imagine. And they're not the only ones looking for the wayward software: the AI is also being pursued by a pair of Wall Street traders, who want to capture her code and turn her into a high-speed trading bot.
Traumatized, angry, and relentlessly hunted, Dorothy has an extraordinary revelation — and devises a plan. As the pursuit of Dorothy converges on a deserted house on the coast of Northern California, Ford must face the ultimate question: is rescuing Dorothy the right thing? Is the AI bent on saving the world … or on wiping out the cancer that is humankind?
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[15]: The Kill Switch
James Rollins and Grant Blackwood
— SIGMA Force (10th)
The mission seems simple enough: extract a pharmaceutical magnate from Russian soil, a volatile man who holds the secret to a deadly bioweapon. But nothing is as it appears to be. A conspiracy of world-shattering scope unravels as former Army Ranger Tucker Wayne and his stalwart companion, Kane, a military working dog of exceptional abilities, struggle to keep one move ahead of their deadly enemies.
From the frozen steppes of Russia to the sun-blasted mountains of South Africa and Namibia, a biological threat millions of years in the making strikes out at the heart of America. All that stands in the way from a global apocalypse: one man and his dog. But can even Tucker and Kane thwart an ecological menace out of the ancient past to save the world's future?
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