Vient de paraître: cinq romans débutent sur notre liste aujourd'hui. (Five just-published novels debut on our list today—our linguistic salute to Bastille Day.) The roster leads off with Danielle Steel, whose Johhny Angel grabs the #2 slot. (Not even Ms. Steel, evidently, can vanquish Da Vinci and his Code.) This is novel #58 for Steel, whose combined sales exceed 510 million copies. Delacorte reports close to 900,000 copies in print. Next up is Hyperion's Trading Up, by Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City), which Women's Wear Daily noted is "guaranteed to be burning up the beaches from Bridgehampton to Bondi." Appropriately, the author's tour winds up next month in East Hampton—no doubt because Bridgehampton, for all its beaches, lacks a bookstore. Bushnell's been greeting SRO crowds of from 300—400, all of whom ask about Bushnell's shoes and about the upcoming finale of HBO's Sex and the City. Following a July 1 pub date, Trading's up to 270,000 copies after four printings.

Also pubbed July 1 was Bare Bones, Kathy Reichs's latest crimefest to star forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. (N.B.: Scribner reports that Tempe "finally has sex with her longtime on again/off again boyfriend, something that readers have been asking for since her first book.") Reichs, too, is on a multicity junket, having done pub-date gigs on Today and Court TV; in-print figure is 150,000. A billionaire arms dealer who once served under Hitler now possesses the dictator's diary—it must be Jack Higgins time. The megaselling author who set the espionage genre ablaze with The Eagle Has Landed is still at the top of his game, as shown in his newest caper, Bad Company. Putnam launched the book on July 7 (copies in print: 164,500) with a print-driven review campaign; raves are already in from Maxim and Deadly Pleasure magazines. A Man to Call My Own is not only Johanna Lindsey's first novel with Atria, but it marks a reunion of sorts. Lindsey's Atria editor, Maggie Crawford, was her editor at Avon, and Carolyn Reidy, head of the Simon & Schuster Adult Trade Group, also worked with Lindsey back in Reidy's Avon days. After two printings, this Man is up to 155,000 copies.

With reporting by Dick Donahue