Richard Osman’s The Bullet that Missed (Viking) pulled the trigger on a third week in the Official UK Top 50 number one spot. Selling 46,547 copies last week, the hardback is now easily the bestselling hardback fiction title of the year, outselling Robert Galbraith’s runner-up The Ink Black Heart (Sphere) by nearly 144,000 units, and it is already the ninth-bestselling Adult Fiction title of the year to date.
The Bullet that Missed’s predecessor, The Man Who Died Twice (Penguin), also bounced 20% week on week to claim the Mass-Market Fiction number one from Claire Douglas’ The Girls Who Disappeared (Penguin). While scoring both the Original Fiction and Mass-Market Fiction number ones simultaneously was previously a rare event for authors who aren’t James Patterson, this was Osman’s 15th time doing the double, last achieved in the final week of 2021 as The Man Who Died Twice’s hardback and The Thursday Murder Club’s paperback reigned side-by-side. Osman fans, Osmaniacs if you will, seemed committed to catching up on the entire series last week, with his début, The Thursday Murder Club, also rising to second place in Mass-Market Fiction, improving 32% in volume week on week.
Osman is looking near-untouchable in the Original Fiction number one—at least until Colleen Hoover’s It Starts with Us (S&S) is published mid-month—but a boatload of new entries sailed into the top 20 last week, with Peter James’ Picture You Dead (Macmillan), Jeffrey Archer’s Next in Line (HarperCollins), Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety (Doubleday), Kerri Maniscalco’s Kingdom of the Feared (Hodder & Stoughton) and Adrienne Young’s Spells for Forgetting (Quercus) thundering into the top six.