James Patterson's ninth Alex Cross thriller,
The Big Bad Wolf, lands in the #2 spot on PW's fiction bestseller list, very close behind the almost invincible chart topper, The Da Vinci Code. Little, Brown's first printing for the book is a hefty 1.1 million; laydown date was November 17. The publisher is celebrating 10 years of detective Cross, introduced in Along Came a Spider back in 1993. The publisher claims that the Cross oeuvre—with sales soon to top 25 million copies and more than $300 million in gross revenue—is "the bestselling detective series of the past decade." Little, Brown is basing some of that claim on Nielsen BookScan 2002 sales figures that showed James Patterson outselling John Grisham, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, Mary Higgins Clark and many others. Patterson has just finished a trip to D.C. (the home of Alex Cross), Philadelphia, and Tampa and Orlando, Fla., and in a few weeks, he heads to Pittsburgh and Palm Beach, Fla. Attendance at these events has been outstanding—crowds of 500 and more, with many fans doing their early holiday shopping, buying three, four, even five copies of The Big Bad Wolf.
