Triple Murders: Richard Osman regains the top spot as scary season kicks into gear

Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders (Viking) notched its third UK Official Top 50 number one, reclaiming the summit after being knocked off it the previous week by Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (Faber). Meanwhile, spooky titles surged, with six Halloween-themed or general horror titles hitting the top 20, led by Tom Fletcher, Dougie Poynter and illustrator Garry Parsons’ The Dinosaur that Pooped Halloween! (Puffin), in seventh place.

Osman’s newest secured the overall pole position on sales of just under 23,000 copies last week through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market⁠ – the title also shifted almost 3,000 units in trade paperback. In the month since it was released, We Solve Murders has sold 220,000 copies for £2.7m. Rooney’s Intermezzo slips to second, its 19,902-unit haul just under half of what it achieved in its launch in the previous seven-day period.

With his overall number one, Osman of course bags another Original Fiction (OF) number one, his 71st since The Thursday Murder Club (Viking) was launched in September 2020⁠ – meaning that one in every three weeks since his fiction début, an Osman novel has perched atop the OF chart. With a 24% surge through the TCM week-on-week to just under 9,000 copies, The Dinosaur that Pooped Halloween! led not only the spooky surge, but bagged the Children’s number one. It is the first kid’s top spot for the now 13-strong Dinosaur that Pooped… series outside of World Book Day titles (The Dinosaur that Pooped A Lot! WBD edition notched four consecutive Children’s number ones in March 2015). Fletcher, Poynter and Parsons’ book has now sold 97,000 copies since it was released in 2022, 90% of those sales have come in the months of September and October.

Fletcher, Poynter and Parsons’ book also headed the Children’s Pre-school chart, which had 14 of its top 20 titles with Halloween themes, including Martha Mumford and Cherie Zamazing’s We’re Going on a Ghost Hunt (Bloomsbury), two versions of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s Room on a Broom (Macmillan Children’s) and Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s classic Funnybones (Puffin).

In Mass Market Fiction (MMF) Harlan Coben’s re-issued 2016 Myron Bolitar thriller, Home (Arrow), rose 54% week-on-week to just over 13,000 copies, displacing Laurie Gilmore’s The Pumpkin Spice Café (One More Chapter) from the top. Somewhat surprisingly, this is only Coben’s seventh time atop MMF.

In a relatively light publication week, Jamie Oliver’s Simply Jamie (Michael Joseph) held on to the Hardback Non-Fiction number one for a second week on the trot. Simply Jamie was the only HBNF title to crack the five-figure volume mark (10,084 units) with the Guinness World Records 2025 a distant second on 6,422 copies.

Though this is not the strongest season for Paperback Non-Fiction (PBNF), the newsiest release of the week was arguably Judi Dench’s Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent (Penguin), as the title dropped in the week her friend, frequent collaborator and fellow national treasure, Maggie Smith died. Perhaps that, and a few marquee events, helped Dench’s book at the tills as is it sold 3,856 copies to displace Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge (Vintage) from its near-customary PBNF top spot.

Overall it was something of a drab week for British bookseller, with £34.2m shifted through the TCM, a 2.5% drop on the previous seven days, and flat on the same period in 2023.