Mystery Bestsellers for the Week Ending July 19, 2014

A list of the top 15 Mystery Hardcover Bestsellers for the week ending July 19th, 2014 has been posted by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books.

Last week's top ten titles remain on the list, with The Silkworm, the second Cormoran Strike mystery by J. K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, staying in the top spot.

But numbers 11 through 15 dropped off the list, replaced with five new titles; debut position in [brackets].

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[7]: The Book of Life
Deborah Harkness
— The All Souls Trilogy Series (3rd)

After traveling through time, historian and witch Diana Bishop and vampire scientist Matthew Clairmont return to the present to face new crises and old enemies. At Matthew's ancestral home at Sept-Tours, they reunite with the cast of characters from A Discovery of Witches — with one significant exception.

But the real threat to their future has yet to be revealed, and when it is, the search for Ashmole 782 and its missing pages takes on even more urgency. In ancestral homes and university laboratories, using ancient knowledge and modern science, from the hills of the Auvergne to the palaces of Venice and beyond, the couple at last learn what the witches discovered so many centuries ago.

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[8]: The Heist
Daniel Silva
— The Gabriel Allon Series (14th)

Legendary spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon is at work in Venice repairing an altarpiece when he receives an urgent summons from the Italian police. The art dealer Julian Isherwood has stumbled upon a murder scene in Lake Como, and is being held as a suspect. To save his friend, Gabriel must perform one simple task: Find the most famous missing painting in the world.

Sometimes the best way to find a stolen masterpiece is to steal another one … The dead man is a fallen spy with a secret: he has been trafficking in stolen artworks and selling them to a mysterious collector. Among those paintings is the world's most iconic missing masterpiece: Caravaggio's Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence.

Gabriel embarks on a daring gambit to recover the Caravaggio that will take him on an exhilarating hunt — from Marseilles and Corsica, to Paris and Geneva, and, finally, to a small private bank in Austria, where a dangerous man stands guard over the ill-gotten wealth of one of the world's most brutal dictators …

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[12]: Cut and Thrust
Stuart Woods
— The Stone Barrington Series (30th)

When Stone Barrington travels to Los Angeles for the biggest political convention of the year, he finds the scene quite shaken up: a dazzling newcomer — and close friend of Stone's — has given the delegates an unexpected choice, crucial alliances are made and broken behind closed doors, and it seems that more than one seat may be up for grabs. And amid the ambitious schemers and hangers-on are a few people who may use the chaotic events as cover for more sinister plans.

In this milieu of glad-handing and backroom deals, only the canniest player can come out on top … and it will take all of Stone's discretion and powers of persuasion to arrange a desirable outcome.

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[13]: Wayfaring Stranger
James Lee Burke
— Non-Series

In 1934, sixteen-year-old Weldon Avery Holland happens upon infamous criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow after one of their notorious armed robberies. A confrontation with the outlaws ends with Weldon firing a gun and being unsure whether it hit its mark.

Ten years later, Second Lieutenant Weldon Holland barely survives the Battle of the Bulge, in the process saving the lives of his sergeant, Hershel Pine, and a young Spanish prisoner of war, Rosita Lowenstein — a woman who holds the same romantic power over him as the strawberry blonde Bonnie Parker, and is equally mysterious. The three return to Texas where Weldon and Hershel get in on the ground floor of the nascent oil business.

In just a few years' time Weldon will spar with the jackals of the industry, rub shoulders with dangerous men, and win and lose fortunes twice over. But it is the prospect of losing his one true love that will spur his most reckless, courageous act yet — one that takes its inspiration from that encounter long ago with the outlaws of his youth.

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[15]: Shots Fired
C. J. Box
— The Stories from Joe Pickett Country

Ten riveting stories — three of them never before published …

In "One-Car Bridge," one of four Joe Pickett stories, Pickett goes up against a "just plain mean" landowner, with disastrous results, and in "Shots Fired," his investigation into the radio call referred to in the title nearly ends up being the last thing he ever does. In "Pirates of Yellowstone," two Eastern European tough guys find out what it means to be strangers in a strange land, and in "Le Sauvage Noble," the stranger is a Lakota in Paris who enjoys playing the "noble savage" for the French women — until he meets Sophie. Then he discovers what "savage" really means.

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