Richard Osman’s The Bullet that Missed (Penguin) scored the double, charting top of both the Nielsen BookScan print charts and the Bookstat e-book chart in its first week on the physical and virtual shelves. The Bullet that Missed, the third title in Osman’s Thursday Murder Club trilogy, becomes the second new fiction title in a month to cruise straight into a print and digital double, following on from Robert Galbraith’s The Ink Black Heart (Sphere) at the end of August.
Simon McCleave’s The Portmeiron Killings (Stamford) notched up second place, knocking Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace (Penguin), the previous week’s number one, to third. T M Logan’s The Curfew (Zaffre) rose into the top five, as Cathy Kelly’s The Wedding Party (Orion) made its début.
The Ink Black Heart made the Publisher E-Book Ranking top spot for the week ending 10th September for a second time, as Galbraith’s Hachette stablemates Stephen King’s Fairy Tale (Hodder) fluttered into second and J D Robb’s Desperation in Death (Piatkus) notched up third. With The Bullet that Missed still to be unleashed on the publisher-supplied e-book charts, the first two books in the series continued to chart in the top 10.
Clarification: Hachette has stated that The Ink Black Heart sold 4,749 copies, A Song for the Dark Times 4,390 and The Wedding Party 4,198.