Richard Osman's We Solve Murders slays its second straight number one

With nearly 50,000 units of We Solve Murders (Viking) sold last week, Richard Osman retained the UK Official Top 50 number one for the second straight week, according to Nielsen Bookscan’s Total Consumer Market. This is Osman’s 45th overall pole position across all formats, while his hardback editions have spent the same number of weeks atop the Original Fiction chart.

Yet We Solve Murder’s total is a 22.6% contraction against the second week for Osman’s The Last Devil to Die (Viking), published in September 2023, and a decline of 51.4% against its launch week.

The first 10 days for Osman’s latest have seen sales of 152,621 copies, down 28% on the same period last year. If this rate continues, We Solve Murders is still on course to sell more than 400,000 copies by the end of December, easily putting it still in contention for 2024’s bestselling book. It should also be noted that We Solve Murders is the first in a new series and as such the sales profile may be different from previous years as readers await initial reviews before rushing out to buy their copy.

Two of Osman’s Thursday Murder Club titles appear in the Official Top 50 this week, with The Last Devil to Die moving up one space and a re-entry for The Thursday Murder Club, though this seems to be due to a shifting top 50 rather than a dramatic increase in sales for Osman’s backlist.

This week’s highest new entry is Alison Saft’s A Dark and Drowning Tide (Daphne Press) just breaking into the top 10 thanks to its inclusion in Illumicrate’s subscription box for September. Not far behind that is Rewitched (Macmillan) by Lucy Jane Wood, helped by a Waterstones special edition.

The Original Fiction chart sees just one other new entry into the Top 10 – Tell Me Everything (Viking) by Elizabeth Strout. With Strout’s popular characters Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge meeting for the first time, sales are up 48% against the publication of Lucy by the Sea, Strout’s last hardback published back in October 2022.

Last week’s announcement of the Booker Shortlist for 2024 helped boost Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (Vintage) into the Original Fiction top 20. With 1,843 books moved through the TCM, last week Kushner’s sales have increased 144% over the previous seven days; the entire Booker shortlist shifted 7,816 units, up from 2,384 in the previous week.

Stephen King’s Holly (Hodder) rises to number one in the Mass Market Fiction chart with a 41% increase in sales week on week; almost incredibly it is the bestselling author’s first paperback number one since 2002’s collaboration with Peter Straub, Black House (HarperCollins).

There’s no movement for the top three slots in Hardback Non-Fiction with Poppy O’Toole’s The Actually Delicious Slow Cooker (Bloomsbury), Gillian Anderson’s Want (Bloomsbury) and Ben Macintyre’s The Siege (Viking) all holding onto their positions. Meanwhile, the 70th Anniversary Edition of the Guinness Book of Records moves up into the top five, increasing sales by 34% against last week.

In the Non-Fiction Paperback chart Rory Stewart returns to the top spot with Politics on the Edge (Vintage) – his 11th appearance at the top of the chart this year.

Jonty Gentoo (Alison Green) from Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler remains at the top of the Children’s Top 20 – and takes 2nd position in the Official UK Top 50 overall – while The Dinosaur that Pooped Halloween from Tom Fletcher, Dougie Poynter and Garry Parsons leads sales of spooky season books that are slowly starting to creep into the top 20.

Some 3.3million books went through the TCM this week, down 8.3% while value dropped 8.5% to £32.3m. Year-on-year, volume is down 1% with the value down 0.8%.