Checking In

Simone St. James lands at #20 in hardcover fiction with The Sun Down Motel, an “engrossing supernatural thriller,” our review said, with a “shocking, satisfying denouement.” St. James debuted in 2012 with the paranormal historical The Haunting of Maddy Clare and followed with three more trade paper originals set in 1920s England. She moved into hardcover and a U.S. setting with 2018’s The Broken Girls, set in the present with flashbacks to the 1950s. With her latest contemporary release, first-week print unit sales continue to rise.

First Dibs

You Never Forget Your First by historian Alexis Coe debuts at #17 in hardcover nonfiction. Our review called it a “breezy yet fact-filled revisionist biography” of the first U.S. president, and it’s garnered a fair bit of attention for the way, as our review wrote, it “takes George Washington’s previous—predominantly male—biographers to task for obsessing over his virility, enshrining myths about his military prowess and moral exactitude, and mischaracterizing his relationship with his mother.”

Paper Chase

The #10 book in the country is the Victorian romance Chasing Cassandra by Lisa Kleypas. It’s the sixth book in her Ravenels series and the first to receive a starred PW review; we called it a “refreshing romance” in which “opposites attract in spectacular fashion.” Together, the five previous books in the mass market original series have sold 330K print copies.

NEW & NOTABLE

DARK TOWERS
David Enrich
#1 Hardcover Nonfiction, #6 overall
In this “propulsive, richly detailed account,” our review said, Enrich chronicles Deutsche Bank’s “outright frauds,” such as laundering money for Russian oligarchs, and “a laundry list of poor decisions, including lending millions of dollars to serial defaulter Donald Trump when no other mainstream financial institution would do so.”

UNTIL THE END OF TIME
Brian Greene
#8 Hardcover Nonfiction
Greene, director of Columbia University’s Center for Theoretical Physics, “translates sophisticated science topics into an accessible and illuminating survey,” our starred review said. “Curious readers interested in some of the most fundamental questions of existence, and willing to invest some time and thought, will be richly rewarded.”

ONE MINUTE OUT
Mark Greaney
#4 Hardcover Fiction
“In bestseller Greaney’s remarkable ninth Gray Man novel,” our starred review said, “Courtland Gentry (aka the Gray Man) takes on the Consortium, an international sex slave cartel.” The upshot? “Spy thriller fans will be enthralled.”