Fiction: Osman's Thursday Murder Club trilogy dominates

Richard Osman’s The Bullet that Missed (Viking) held second place in the Top 50, and also topped its category chart. The third Thursday Murder Club title sold 27,592 copies to claim its seventh Original Fiction pole, leading a top four identical on the week before, with Colleen Hoover’s former number one It Starts with Us (S&S), Lee and Andrew Child’s No Plan B (Bantam) and Bob Mortimer’s The Satsuma Complex (S&S) holding firm.

The two previous Thursday Murder Club titles bounced up the Mass-Market Fiction top 20, but still could not unseat Hoover’s It Ends with Us, which thundered into its sixth straight week at the top (and its 14th category number one this year). TikTok’s favourite title is looking unstoppable in its quest to claim the bestseller of the year title, with more than 170,000 units between it and second-placed The Man Who Died Twice. Like The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (Ebury), it will achieve the rare feat of topping an annual chart years on from its publication—It Ends with Us was originally released in 2016.