Missed It by One

That would be Nelson DeMille, with his latest bestseller, Up Country. This week would have been his single opportunity to hit the national charts in the #1 position; instead, he will have to make do with #2. Last week's top seller, Journey Through Heartsongs, had its two-week run, and next week's lead spot will definitely be taken by John Grisham's The Summons. Grisham generally stays in the top slot for at least a month, often up to two, so this was DeMille's moment. The #1 spot this week is occupied by The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red, a fictional journal presented as a historical account of a young woman and her life married to a Seattle oil magnate in the early 1900s. The diary's editor, an equally fictional psychology professor, Joyce Reardon, uses the journal in her investigation of the haunted Rose Red mansion. The catalyst for the top spot is that the diary is the companion to Stephen King's Rose Red, a three-part miniseries that aired January 27, 28 and 31. Extensive on-air promotion of The Diary before the series aired propelled the book to the coveted top spot. Hyperion has gone back to press three times, bringing the in-print figure to 245,000.

Up Country is a sequel to DeMille's 1992 The General's Daughter. That went as high as #3 on PW's weekly charts and stayed on for 14 weeks, then returned for an additional 11 weeks on the mass market list in 1999 as a movie tie-in. Paramount Pictures bought the film rights to Up Country and John Travolta is in negotiation to play Paul Brenner, the character he portrayed in The General's Daughter. DeMille is on the road (visiting 21 cities) through the first week in March; he signed more than 500 copies at his first stop, on January 30, at Barnes & Noble in Carle Place, N.Y. Warner's first printing for Up Country is 650,000. The publisher reports that there are more than 30 million copies of the author's books in print worldwide.

With reporting by Dick Donahue