She Slays

Debuting at #4 in hardcover fiction, Karin Slaughter’s The Last Widow is a “visceral, gratifying” thriller, our review said. It’s the ninth entry in her series starring Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent; launch-week sales have been picking up with each installment. Slaughter also has had recent success with her standalones, including 2018’s Pieces of Her, which is headed to Netflix as an eight-episode limited series.

(See all of this week's bestselling books.)

Movie Watch

The big-screen adaptation of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Goldfinch hits theaters September 13, and as the publicity machine ramps up, so too are book sales. The 2014 trade paperback has been trending upward all summer, and on our current list, it’s the #7 book in the country, with sales more than double those of the previous week.

Best in Show

The #3 book in the country is Thank You for My Service by YouTuber and five-tour Army Ranger Mat Best. He’s built a YouTube platform one million subscribers strong with frequently NSFW videos and has lent his swaggering brand to military-themed coffee, booze, and apparel companies that employ fellow veterans. In his memoir, he is unrepentantly gleeful about his time in Iraq and Afghanistan, writing: “The one thing I have missed more than anything—every waking moment of every day—since I left the military,” he writes, is “the thrill of war.”

New & Notable

Old Bones
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
#3 Hardcover Fiction
“Archaeologist Nora Kelly takes center stage in this intriguing series launch,” our review said, assuring fans of the writing duo that “Preston and Child have recaptured some of their old magic.”

The Outlaw Ocean
Ian Urbina
#7 Hardcover Nonfiction
In a book based on Urbina’s investigative series for the New York Times, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter offers an account of criminal activity on the high seas and, as he writes in the introduction, “an ocean woefully underprotected and the mayhem and misery often faced by those who work these waters.”

Top 10 Overall

Rank Title Author Imprint Units
1 For Whom the Ball Rolls (Dog Man #7) Dav Pilkey Graphix 125,896
2 Where the Crawdads Sing Delia Owens Putnam 40,119
3 Thank You for My Service Mat Best Bantam 26,038
4 We Don’t Eat Our Classmates Ryan T. Higgins Disney-Hyperion 21,946
5 Educated Tara Westover Random House 20,616
6 The Inn Patterson/Fox Little, Brown 16,239
7 The Goldfinch Donna Tartt Back Bay 15,235
8 One Good Deed David Baldacci Grand Central 14,384
9 Old Bones Preston/Child Grand Central 13,276
10 The Art of Racing in the Rain (movie tie-in) Garth Stein Harper 13,048

All unit sales per NPD BookScan except where noted.