Number 1 New York Times Fiction Bestsellers 2005
Explore the complete list of 2005 New York Times #1 Fiction Bestsellers—discover top-rated novels that dominated the charts. Find your next great read today!

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The Broker
by John Grisham
The outgoing President grants a controversial last-minute pardon to Joel Backman, a notorious Washington power broker who has spent the last six years hidden away in a federal prison. The President issued a pardon under pressure by the CIA.Given a new home,new name, in Italy. Who will kill him?

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Honeymoon
by James Patterson
In his sexiest, scariest novel yet, James Patterson deftly confirms that he always "takes thrills to the next level" (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review). When FBI agent John O'Hara first sees Nora Sinclair, she seems perfect. She has the looks. The career. The clothes. The wit. The sophistication. The tantalizing sex appeal. The whole extraordinary package-and men fall in line to court her. She doesn't just attract men, she enthralls them. So why is the FBI so interested in Nora Sinclair? Mysterious things keep happening to people around her, especially the men. And there is something dangerous about Nora when Agent O'Hara looks closer-something that lures him at the same time that it fills him with fear. Is there something dark hidden among the unexplained gaps in her past? And as he spends more and more time getting to know her, is he pursuing justice? Or his own fatal obsession? With the irresistible attraction of the greatest Hitchcock thrillers, Honeymoon is a sizzling, twisting tale of a woman with a deadly appetite and the men who dare to fall for her.

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The Rising
by Tim LaHaye
The countdown to Rapture begins as Marilena Carpathia unknowingly gives birth to the Antichrist, and half a world away, God's plans begin to take form in young Ray Steele.

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No Place Like Home
by Mary Higgins Clark
In the latest thriller from America's queen of suspense, a young woman is ensnared into returning to a place she had wanted to leave behind forever--her childhood home.

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True Believer
by Nicholas Sparks
As a science journalist with a regular column in Scientific American, Jeremy Marsh specializes in debunking the supernatural. A born skeptic, he travels to the small town of Boone Creek, North Carolina, determined to find the real cause behind the ghostly apparitions that appear in the towns cemetery. What he doesnt plan on, however, is falling hopelessly in love with Lexie Darnell, granddaughter of the town psychic. Now, if the young lovers are to have any kind of future at all, Jeremy must make a difficult choice: return to the life he knows, or do something hes never done beforetake a giant leap of faith.

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4th of July
by James Patterson
Charged with police brutality after a routine arrest goes wrong, Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer waits for her trial in the town of Half Moon Bay, where she discovers a link between a string of murders and a case she worked on years earlier.

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The Closers
by Michael Connelly
He walked away from the job three years ago. But Harry Bosch cannot resist the call to join the elite Open/Unsolved Unit. His mission: solve murders whose investigations were flawed, stalled, or abandoned to L.A.'s tides of crime. With some people openly rooting for his failure, Harry catches the case of a teenager dragged off to her death on Oat Mountain, and traces the DNA on the murder weapon to a small-time criminal. But something bigger and darker beckons, and Harry must battle to fit all the pieces together. Shaking cages and rattling ghosts, he will push the rules to the limit-and expose the kind of truth that shatters lives, ends careers, and keeps the dead whispering in the night....

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The Mermaid Chair
by Sue Monk Kidd
A transcendent tale of a woman's self-discovery—the New York Times–bestselling second work of fiction by the author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Book of Longings Inside the church of a Benedictine monastery on Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. When Jessie Sullivan is summoned home to the island to cope with her eccentric mother’s seemingly inexplicable behavior, she is living a conventional life with her husband, Hugh, a life “molded to the smallest space possible.” Jessie loves Hugh, but once on the island, she finds herself drawn to Brother Thomas, a monk about to take his final vows. Amid a rich community of unforgettable island women and the exotic beauty of marshlands, tidal creeks, and majestic egrets, Jessie grapples with the tension of desire and the struggle to deny it, with a freedom that feels overwhelmingly right, and with the immutable force of home and marriage. Is the power of the mermaid chair only a myth? Or will it alter the course of Jessie’s life? What happens will unlock the roots of her mother’s tormented past, but most of all, it will allow Jessie to discover selfhood and a place of belonging as she explores the thin line between the spiritual and the erotic.

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The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters addressed ominously to 'My dear and unfortunate successor'. Her discovery plunges her into a world she never dreamed of - a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an evil hidden in the depths of history. In those few quiet moments, she unwittingly assumes a quest she will discover is her birthright - a hunt for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the Dracula myth. Deciphering obscure signs and hidden texts, reading codes worked into the fabric of medieval monastic traditions, and evading terrifying adversaries, one woman comes ever closer to the secret of her own past and a confrontation with the very definition of evil. Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel is an adventure of monumental proportions - a captivating tale that blends fact and fantasy, history and the present with an assurance that is almost unbearably suspenseful - and utterly unforgettable.

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Eleven on Top
by Janet Evanovich
Hoping to discontinue her career as a bounty hunter for something safer, Stephanie Plum is inadvertently drawn into a case that is complicated by her tangled love life, her chaotic family, and her penchant for wrecking cars.


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Chill Factor
by Sandra Brown
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Seeing Red comes a suspense novel about a woman trapped in a remote cabin with a man who may be a serial killer. Five women are missing from the sleepy mountain town of Cleary, North Carolina, and a blue ribbon has been left near where each woman was last seen. Lilly Martin has returned to Cleary to close the sale of her cabin. But when her car skids and strikes a stranger, Ben Tierney, as he emerges from the woods, they've no choice but to wait out a brutal blizzard in the cabin. And as the hours of their confinement mount, Lilly wonders if the greater threat to her safety isn't the storm, but the stranger beside her....

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Point Blank
by Catherine Coulter
Agents Lacey Sherlock and Dillon Savich are up against an unstable villain with a very long memory in this FBI Thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter. The explosive action kicks off as treasure-hunting FBI agent Ruth Warnecki is on the trail of stolen Confederate gold hidden in Winkel’s cave in western Virginia. She never expects to find herself chin-deep in a grisly murder that leaves her nearly dead and rocks the town of Maestro. Then, at a stake-out in Maryland, FBI agents Dillon Savich and Dane Carver are nearly killed in a horrific explosion while attempting to rescue kidnap victim, Pinky Womack. They are led to Arlington National Cemetery where they not only find Pinky, but Savich also takes a fateful call on his cell from an old man out to kill both him and Sherlock. The thing is they have no clue why. Pitted against an insane killer and his psychotic teenage girlfriend, Savich and Sherlock find themselves fighting a hate-driven villain with a grudge worth killing for...

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Polar Shift
by Clive Cussler
The most exciting NUMA(r) Files novel yet. Abridged CD - 5 CDs, 6 hours

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Anansi Boys
by Neil Gaiman
Fat Charlie Nancy's normal life ended the moment his father dropped dead on a Florida karaoke stage. Charlie didn't know his dad was a god. And he never knew he had a brother. Now brother Spider's on his doorstep—about to make Fat Charlie's life more interesting . . . and a lot more dangerous.


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The Lincoln Lawyer
by Michael Connelly
Representing some unsavory characters in his work as a defense lawyer, Mickey Haller takes on his first high-paying and possibly innocent client in years, but finds the case complicated by events that suggest a particularly evil perpetrator.


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At First Sight
by Nicholas Sparks
There are few things Jeremy Marsh was sure he'd never do: he'd never leave New York City; never give his heart away again after barely surviving one failed marriage; and most of all, never become a parent. Now, Jeremy is living in the tiny town of Boone Creek, North Carolina, married to Lexie Darnell, the love of his life, and anticipating the birth of their daughter. But just as his life seems to be settling into a blissful pattern, an unsettling and mysterious message re-opens old wounds and sets off a chain of events that will forever change the course of this young couple's marriage . . .

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Predator
by Patricia Cornwell
Investigating the disappearance of two sisters in Florida, Dr. Kay Scarpetta follows clues that twist and turn, leading her into the psychopathic depths of a jailed serial killer's mind.

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A Feast for Crows
by George R. R. Martin
THE BOOK BEHIND THE FOURTH SEASON OF GAME OF THRONES, AN ORIGINAL SERIES NOW ON HBO. Here is the fourth book in the landmark series that has redefined imaginative fiction and become a modern masterpiece in the making. A FEAST FOR CROWS After centuries of bitter strife, the seven powers dividing the land have beaten one another into an uneasy truce. But it’s not long before the survivors, outlaws, renegades, and carrion eaters of the Seven Kingdoms gather. Now, as the human crows assemble over a banquet of ashes, daring new plots and dangerous new alliances are formed while surprising faces—some familiar, others only just appearing—emerge from an ominous twilight of past struggles and chaos to take up the challenges of the terrible times ahead. Nobles and commoners, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and sages, are coming together to stake their fortunes . . . and their lives. For at a feast for crows, many are the guests—but only a few are the survivors. A GAME OF THRONES • A CLASH OF KINGS • A STORM OF SWORDS • A FEAST FOR CROWS • A DANCE WITH DRAGONS


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S is for Silence
by Sue Grafton
Thirty-four years after Violet Sullivan's unexplained disappearance, Daisy--the not-quite-seven-year-old daughter she left behind--enlists the assistance of private detective Kinsey Millhone to help her find the truth.