A list of the top 15 Mystery Hardcover Bestsellers for the week ending June 6th, 2014 has been posted by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books.
James Patterson's Women's Murder Club mystery, Unlucky 13, retains the top spot on our list this week; indeed, there is no change in the order of the top five.
Six new titles enter the list — position in [brackets].
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[6]: Mr. Mercedes
Stephen King
In the frigid pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of desperate unemployed folks are lined up for a spot at a job fair. Without warning, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes.
In another part of town, months later, a retired cop named Bill Hodges is still haunted by the unsolved crime. When he gets a crazed letter from someone who self-identifies as the "perk" and threatens an even more diabolical attack, Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, hell-bent on preventing another tragedy.
Brady Hartsfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. He loved the feel of death under the wheels of the Mercedes, and he wants that rush again. Only Bill Hodges, with a couple of highly unlikely allies, can apprehend the killer before he strikes again. And they have no time to lose, because Brady’s next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim thousands.
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[8]: Midnight in Europe
Alan Furst
Paris, 1938. As the shadow of war darkens Europe, democratic forces on the Continent struggle against fascism and communism, while in Spain the war has already begun.
Cristián Ferrar, a brilliant and handsome Spanish émigré, is a lawyer in the Paris office of a prestigious international law firm. Ferrar is approached by the embassy of the Spanish Republic and asked to help a clandestine agency trying desperately to supply weapons to the Republic's beleaguered army — an effort that puts his life at risk in the battle against fascism.
Joining Ferrar in this mission is a group of unlikely men and women: idealists and gangsters, arms traders and aristocrats and spies. From shady Paris nightclubs to white-shoe New York law firms, from brothels in Istanbul to the dockyards of Poland, Ferrar and his allies battle the secret agents of Hitler and Franco. And what allies they are: there's Max de Lyon, a former arms merchant now hunted by the Gestapo; the Marquesa Maria Cristina, a beautiful aristocrat with a taste for danger; and the Macedonian Stavros, who grew up "fighting Bulgarian bandits. After that, being a gangster was easy." Then there is Eileen Moore, the American woman Ferrar could never forget.
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[9]: The Director
David Ignatius
Graham Weber has been the director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid in a dirty T-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg and says the agency has been hacked, and he has a list of agents' names to prove it. This is the moment a CIA director most dreads.
Weber turns to a charismatic (and unstable) young man named James Morris who runs the Internet Operations Center. He's the CIA's in-house geek. Weber launches Morris on a mole hunt unlike anything in spy fiction — one that takes the reader into the hacker underground of Europe and America and ends up in a landscape of paranoia and betrayal. Like the new world of cyber-espionage from which it's drawn, The Director is a maze of deception and double dealing, about a world where everything is written in zeroes and ones and nothing can be trusted. The CIA has belatedly discovered that this is not your father’s Cold War, and Weber must play catch-up, against the clock and an unknown enemy, in a game he does not yet understand.
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[11]: Summer House with Swimming Pool
Herman Koch
When a medical procedure goes horribly wrong and famous actor Ralph Meier winds up dead, Dr. Marc Schlosser needs to come up with some answers. After all, reputation is everything in this business. Personally, he's not exactly upset that Ralph is gone, but as a high profile doctor to the stars, Marc can't hide from the truth forever.
It all started the previous summer. Marc, his wife, and their two beautiful teenage daughters agreed to spend a week at the Meier's extravagant summer home on the Mediterranean. Joined by Ralph and his striking wife Judith, her mother, and film director Stanley Forbes and his much younger girlfriend, the large group settles in for days of sunshine, wine tasting, and trips to the beach. But when a violent incident disrupts the idyll, darker motivations are revealed, and suddenly no one can be trusted. As the ultimate holiday soon turns into a nightmare, the circumstances surrounding Ralph's later death begin to reveal the disturbing reality behind that summer's tragedy.
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[14]: Vertigo 42
Martha Grimes
— Richard Jury (23rd)
Richard Jury is meeting Tom Williamson at Vertigo 42, a bar on the forty-second floor of an office building in London's financial district. Despite inconclusive evidence, Tom is convinced his wife, Tess, was murdered seventeen years ago. The inspector in charge of the case was sure Tess's death was accidental — a direct result of vertigo — but the official police inquiry is still an open verdict and Jury agrees to re-examine the case.
Jury learns that a nine-year-old girl fell to her death five years before Tess at the same country house in Devon where Tess died. The girl had been a guest at a party Tess was giving for six children. Jury seeks out the five surviving party guests, who are now adults, hoping they can shed light on this bizarre coincidence.
Meanwhile, an elegantly dressed woman falls to her death from the tower of a cottage near the pub where Jury and his cronies are dining one night. Then the dead woman's estranged husband is killed as well. Four deaths — two in the past, two in the present — keep Richard Jury and his sidekick Sergeant Wiggins running from their homes in Islington to the countryside in Devon and to London as they try to figure out if the deaths were accidental or not. And, if they are connected.
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[16]: FaceOff
David Baldacci, editor
— Short Story Anthology
In an unprecedented collaboration, twenty-three of the world's bestselling and critically acclaimed thriller writers have paired their series characters — such as Harry Bosch, Jack Reacher, and Lincoln Rhyme — in an eleven-story anthology curated by the International Thriller Writers (ITW). All of the contributors to FaceOff are ITW members and the stories feature these dynamic duos:
• Patrick Kenzie vs. Harry Bosch in "Red Eye" by Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly;
• John Rebus vs. Roy Grace in "In the Nick of Time" by Ian Rankin and Peter James;
• Slappy the Ventriloquist Dummy vs. Aloysius Pendergast in "Gaslighted" by R.L. Stine, Douglas Preston, and Lincoln Child;
• Malachai Samuels vs. D.D. Warren in "The Laughing Buddha" by M.J. Rose and Lisa Gardner;
• Paul Madriani vs. Alexandra Cooper in "Surfing the Panther" by Steve Martini and Linda Fairstein;
• Lincoln Rhyme vs. Lucas Davenport in "Rhymes With Prey" by Jeffery Deaver and John Sandford;
• Michael Quinn vs. Repairman Jack in "Infernal Night" by Heather Graham and F. Paul Wilson;
• Sean Reilly vs. Glen Garber in "Pit Stop" by Raymond Khoury and Linwood Barclay;
• Wyatt Hunt vs. Joe Trona in "Silent Hunt" by John Lescroart and T. Jefferson Parker;
• Cotton Malone vs. Gray Pierce in "The Devil's Bones" by Steve Berry and James Rollins;
• Jack Reacher vs. Nick Heller in "Good and Valuable Consideration" by Lee Child and Joseph Finder.
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