Weekly E-Ranking: Jojo Completely Fine at number one

Jojo Moyes is "still" top of the Weekly E-Book Ranking, as Still Me, the third title in her million-copy-selling Me Before You trilogy, spent a second week as the UK’s bestselling e-book. Me Before You and After You racked up 11 weeks at the top of the chart between them in summer 2016, so expect to hear that "still" pun again. It seems some e-book buyers are still working their way through the trilogy, too, because prequel After You surged from 19th place in last week’s list to eighth this week.

The top three were eerily similar to the week before—Still Me, Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (which rose from third to second place) and a book with "death" in the title. J D Robb’s Dark Death replaced last week’s runner-up Helen Fields’ Perfect Death, in the top three.

A J Finn’s psychological thriller The Woman in the Window jumped from sixth to fourth place. Its print edition returns remarkably consistent weekly volumes: it has sold between 4,300 and 4,600 copies in every week since its release. The last domestic suspense title with a similar "The (blank) in/on the (blank)" title structure to have steadily staunch hardback volumes and endless success in digital was, of course, Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train—and The Woman in the Window may well follow in its tracks.

Aussie rules 

Jane Harper’s 2017 Aussie Outback-set mystery novel The Dry, which spent more than 20 weeks in the Weekly E-Book Ranking last year, is still riding the crest of an end-of-year-review wave, after featuring in many newspapers’ crime titles of the year round-ups. Last week, the author’s follow-up, Force of Nature, also featuring Detective Aaron Falk, joined it in the digital top 20.

The Dry featured as Waterstones’ Thriller of the Month for two months running in summer 2017, and another Waterstones-approved author, Mick Herron, charted in the ranking last week. Herron’s Slow Horses climbed to the top of the Fiction Heatseekers twice in August, during its reign as the retailer’s monthly thriller of choice—nearly two years after its original publication—and a month later the fourth Jackson Lamb title, Spook Street, did exactly the same. Slow Horses briefly hit the weekly ranking in July 2016, in 15th, but Herron’s new release, London Rules, made its début in a loftier seventh place last week.