TheBestseller
Observatory

Best Sellers

Hardcover Fiction

Week of November 7, 2004

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NORTHERN LIGHTS
Nora Roberts
Cover of NORTHERN LIGHTS

NORTHERN LIGHTS

by Nora Roberts · Putnam

2 wks at #1 · 2 on list

Let #1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts fly you into Lunacy, Alaska, and into a colorful, compelling novel about two lonely souls who are searching for love and redemption... As a Baltimore cop, Nate Burke watched his partner die on the street—and the guilt still haunts him. With nowhere else to go, he accepted the job as Chief of Police in a tiny, remote Alaskan town with the hopes of starting over. Despite the name, Lunacy provides a balm for Nate's shattered soul—and an unexpected affair with pilot Meg Galloway warms his nights... But other things in Lunacy are heating up. Nate suspects the killer in an unsolved murder still walks the snowy streets. His investigation will unearth the secrets and suspicions that lurk beneath the placid surface, as well as bring out the big-city survival instincts that made him a cop in the first place. And his discovery will threaten the new life—and the new love—that he has finally found for himself.

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THE DA VINCI CODE
Dan Brown
Cover of THE DA VINCI CODE

THE DA VINCI CODE

by Dan Brown · Doubleday

84 wks on list

THE #1 WORLDWIDE BESTSELLING PHENOMENON, WITH MORE THAN 85 MILLION COPIES SOLD “Blockbuster perfection . . . a gleefully erudite suspense novel.” —The New York Times “A pulse-quickening, brain-teasing adventure.” —People While in Paris, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is awakened by a phone call in the dead of the night. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum, his body covered in baffling symbols. As Langdon and gifted French cryptologist Sophie Neveu sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to discover a trail of clues hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci—clues visible for all to see and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter. Even more startling, the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion, a secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, and he guarded a breathtaking historical secret. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle—while avoiding the faceless adversary who shadows their every move—the explosive, ancient truth will be lost forever. Robert Langdon returns in The Lost Symbol, Inferno, Origin, and The Secret of Secrets (coming soon)!

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THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA
Philip Roth
Cover of THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA

by Philip Roth · Houghton Mifflin

5 wks on list

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY “It's not a prophecy; it's a nightmare. . . . [A] sinuous and brilliant book, with its extreme sweetness, its black pain, and its low, ceaseless cackle.” —The New Yorker “Huge, inflammatory, painfully moving. . . .Far and away the most outward-looking, expansive. . . book Roth has written." —The Washington Post Book World “A terrific political novel. . . . sinister, vivid, dreamlike. . . creepily plausible." —The New York Times Book Review “Ambitous and chilling . . . a breathtaking leap of imagination. . . . The writing is brilliant.” —USA Today In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threatens to destroy his small, safe corner of America—and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.

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THE GIFT
Nora Roberts

THE GIFT

by Nora Roberts · Silhouette

3 wks on list
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TRACE
Patricia Cornwell
Cover of TRACE

TRACE

by Patricia Cornwell · Putnam

7 wks on list

Since Postmortem garnered critical acclaim and a record-breaking five awards for a first crime novel, the Scarpetta novels have often been imitated, but never bettered. Against her own judgement and the advice of Benton Wesley and her niece, Lucy, Scarpetta agrees to return to Virginia as a consultant pathologist on a case involving the death of a fourteen-year-old girl. Accompanied by Pete Marino she finds the once familiar territory of her morgue and her department much changed, and the new Chief Medical Examiner treats her with disdain despite the obvious fact that he is in desperate need of her expertise. But professional as ever, she re-examines the evidence and proves the girl was murdered. She also finds trace evidence which matches that found on an accident victim and at the scene where one of Lucy's operatives was attacked. It is not only a forensic puzzle, but opens up the probability that someone is after those closest to Scarpetta. Visit the author's website at www.patriciacornwell.com

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THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN
Mitch Albom
Cover of THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN

THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN

by Mitch Albom · Hyperion

57 wks on list

Plot Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him, as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers. One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his "meaningless" life, and revealing the haunting secret behind the eternal question: "Why was I here" Personal Details Collection Status In Collection Index 10 Read It Yes Links Amazon US Product Details LoC Classification PS3601.L335F59 2003 Dewey 813/.6

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LIGHT ON SNOW
Anita Shreve
Cover of LIGHT ON SNOW

LIGHT ON SNOW

by Anita Shreve · Little, Brown

2 wks on list

I watched my father run forward in his snowshoes the way one sometimes does in dreams, unable to make the legs move fast enough. I ran to the place where he knelt. I looked down into the sleeping bag. A tiny face gazed up at me, the eyes wide despite their many folds. The baby was wrapped in a bloody towel, and its lips were blue.' The events of a December afternoon on which a father and his daughter find an abandoned infant in the snow will forever alter eleven-year-old Nicky Dillon's understanding of the world which she is about to enter and the adults who inhabit it: a father who has taken great pains to remove himself from society in order to put behind him an unthinkable tragedy; a young woman who must live with the consequences of the terrible choices she has made; and a detective whose cleverness is superseded only by his sense of justice. Written from the point of view of thirty-year-old Nicky as she recalls the vivid images of that fateful December, hers is a tale of love and courage, of tragedy and redemption, and of the ways in which the human heart always seeks to heal itself.

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THE PRINCE OF BEVERLY HILLS
Stuart Woods
Cover of THE PRINCE OF BEVERLY HILLS

THE PRINCE OF BEVERLY HILLS

by Stuart Woods · Putnam

2 wks on list

Rick Barron, a sharp, capable detective on the Beverly Hills police force, is also the security boss of Centrion Pictures, where he is the "white knight" of movie stars, until he stumbles across a murder cover-up and a blackmail scam that threatens the studio's business.

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SHOPAHOLIC & SISTER
Sophie Kinsella
Cover of SHOPAHOLIC & SISTER

SHOPAHOLIC & SISTER

by Sophie Kinsella · Dial Press

4 wks on list

Rebecca is happily married to Luke. But suddenly into her life steps a sister, of whose existense Becky had been completely unaware. Becky is only too anxious to welcome Jessica into the family. There's only one snag - Jessica hates shopping

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THE SUNDAY PHILOSOPHY CLUB
Alexander McCall Smith
Cover of THE SUNDAY PHILOSOPHY CLUB

THE SUNDAY PHILOSOPHY CLUB

by Alexander McCall Smith · Pantheon

4 wks on list

BOOK ONE IN THE MUCH-LOVED ISABEL DALHOUSIE SERIES Isabel Dalhousie knows that behind Edinburgh's Georgian facades, its moral compasses spin with greed, dishonesty and lust. As a philosopher, editor of the Review of Applied Ethics and founder of the Sunday Philosophy Club, her business is to map the intricacies of human behaviour. But when she sees a man tumble from the balcony at the Usher Hall, it's her instinct that tells her strongly that he didn't fall: he was pushed. Isabel turns amateur sleuth in a bid to solve the mystery of the falling man, and what she lacks in official status she makes up for in contacts and informants, including her housekeeper Grace, her beautiful niece Cat, and Cat's ex-boyfriend Jamie, whose charms are causing Isabel to review her own ethics. PRAISE FOR THE ISABEL DALHOUSIE NOVELS: 'Isabel Dalhousie's charm is undeniable' Sunday Times 'The No. 2 Lady Detective . . . anyone who loves Precious cannot fail to be charmed' Mail on Sunday 'Delightful . . . McCall Smith is a writer who celebrates kindness, in short supply in the world today' Sunday Telegraph 'McCall Smith's greatest gift as a writer - and God knows this is just one of many - is that he can write likeable characters' New Statesman

Historical bestseller data sourced from the New York Times Book Review, archived by Hawes Publications.