TheBestseller
Observatory

Best Sellers

Hardcover Fiction

Week of December 5, 2004

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

THE DA VINCI CODE

by Dan Brown · Doubleday

59 wks at #1 · 88 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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LONDON BRIDGES
James Patterson
Cover of LONDON BRIDGES

LONDON BRIDGES

by James Patterson · Little, Brown

2 wks on list

When the world's largest cities are seized by terrorists who threaten to set off deadly bombs unless their demands are met, Alex Cross heads a joint investigation by the FBI, CIA, and Interpol to outmaneuver two vicious criminals known as the Weasel and the Wolf. By the author of The Big Bad Wolf.

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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

61 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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HOUR GAME
David Baldacci
Cover of HOUR GAME

HOUR GAME

by David Baldacci · Warner

4 wks on list

A man accused of burglary seems innocent . . . but in this #1 New York Times bestseller, two ex-Secret Service agents quickly learn that nothing is more dangerous than the truth. A woman is found murdered in the woods. It seems like a simple case but it soon escalates into a terrible nightmare. Someone is replicating the killing styles of the most infamous murderers of all time. No one knows this criminal's motives...or who will die next. Two ex-Secret Service agents, Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, have been hired to defend a man's innocence in a burglary involving an aristocratic family. Then a series of secrets leads the partners right into the frantic hunt that is confounding even the FBI. Now King and Maxwell are playing the Hour Game, uncovering one horrifying revelation after another and putting their lives in danger. For the closer they get to the truth, the closer they get to the most shocking surprise of all.

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METRO GIRL
Janet Evanovich
Cover of METRO GIRL

METRO GIRL

by Janet Evanovich · HarperCollins

3 wks on list

When her wild and womanizing younger brother goes missing in southern Florida, Alexandra Barnaby endures humidity, sunburn, and bugs in her search for him alongside Sam Hooker, who believes Barnaby's brother has stolen his boat.

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THE GODFATHER RETURNS
Mark Winegardner
Cover of THE GODFATHER RETURNS

THE GODFATHER RETURNS

by Mark Winegardner · Random House

1 wks on list

Beginning in 1955, when Puzo's novel ends, Mark Winegardner fills the gaps in e saga of the Corleone family.

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THE CHRISTMAS THIEF
Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark

THE CHRISTMAS THIEF

by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark · Simon & Schuster/Scribner

2 wks on list

A tree chosen as the Rockefeller Center's Christmas tree was cut down and carted away by unknown persons but did they know a flask filled with diamonds was hidden in one of the branches?

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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

9 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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RUNAWAY
Alice Munro
Cover of RUNAWAY

RUNAWAY

by Alice Munro · Knopf

1 wks on list
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A REDBIRD CHRISTMAS
Fannie Flagg
Cover of A REDBIRD CHRISTMAS

A REDBIRD CHRISTMAS

by Fannie Flagg · Random House

3 wks on list

The time: 1946-2000. The Place: Elmwood Springs, Missouri. Right in the middle of everywhere, which could be anywhere. World War II has ended and the joyous transitions to peace are being - mostly - embraced. At the heart of the novel is the inimitable Neighbour Dorothy, broadcasting daily, with Mother Smith on the organ, from her front room, via the tower in her backyard, to an eager, and at times lonely, audience across the state - who often hear more than her own family would like about the antics of wayward son Bobby and adolescent Anna Lee. And meet the Oatman Family, white Southern Gospel Singers at a pharmaceutical convention in Memphis, where they blow the place away; timid, little Betty Raye Oatman who can't stand the life and ends up in a Governor's mansion; Hamm Sparks, a super-salesman everyone likes and trusts, who soon sells all of Missouri; and the phenomena known as the Sunset Club, Dinner on the Ground and the Funeral King.; not to mention the changing face of small-town America. Humour and poignancy, wit and nostalgia, Fannie Flagg mixes the cocktail of small-town American life to perfection.

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FALLING AWAKE
Jayne Ann Krentz
Cover of FALLING AWAKE

FALLING AWAKE

by Jayne Ann Krentz · Putnam

1 wks on list

Isabel Wright spends her days at the Belvedere Centre for Sleep Research analyzing the dreams of others. It's satisfying, lucrative work, but it can be emotionally draining at times. Especially when one of her anonymous subjects, known only as Client Number Two, captures her imagination through his compelling dream narratives. Client Number Two's real name is Ellis Cutler. A loner who learned long ago not to let anyone get too close, he works for a highly classified government agency with an interest in the potential value of lucid dreaming. And he has just been ordered by his boss to make contact with Isabel, who's been fired after the sudden death of her boss, Dr. Belvedere. When they meet in the flesh, the dream becomes real enough to touch. And a waking nightmare begins. For a suspicious hit-and-run leads them into a perilous web of passion, betrayal and murder, and forces them to walk the razor-thin line between dreams and reality

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LIGHT ON SNOW
Anita Shreve
Cover of LIGHT ON SNOW

LIGHT ON SNOW

by Anita Shreve · Little, Brown

6 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.

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