Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code limited Stephen King's latest bestseller, Song of Susannah, to just a one-week run at the top of the fiction chart. Meanwhile, three new fiction titles landed in the top 10 this week: Catherine Coulter's Blowout from Putnam, Kathy Reichs's Monday Mourning from Scribner and Elizabeth Lowell's The Color of Death from Morrow; rankings are #6, #8 and #9, respectively.
Coulter began her successful writing career (56 books; 50 of them national bestsellers) in 1978 with a Regency romance, The Autumn Countess, and began writing FBI thrillers in 1995. Her first, The Cove, has sold more than 1.5 million since then. Her latest thriller, Blowout, has more than 322,000 copies in print.
Forensic anthropologist Reichs hits the charts with her seventh bestseller, Monday Mourning. Scribner put together five pamphlets for booksellers called "Inside the Forensic Files of Dr. Kathy Reichs" to tie in with the forensic science in her books and to tease the latest book, which has 160,000 copies in print. The doctor is doing a 12-city tour that includes local media appearances and bookstore signings.
The dark side of the gem industry is the setting for Lowell's latest suspense novel, The Color of Death. Morrow has 150,000 copies of the book in print. Lowell, too, is a prolific author. Individually and with her coauthor/ husband, Evan, Ann Maxwell (Lowell is a pseudonym) has written more than 50 novels. Morrow reports that there are more than 30 million copies of her books in print.
