Two threesomes

In the adult fiction category of this week’s Nielsen Weekly Bestsellers Lists there are three by the same author. I don’t recall this ever happening before. Two by the same author, yes; three, no. The author is Graeme Lay and the books are his Captain Cook trilogy The Secret Life of James Cook (2013) at #9, James Cook’s New World (2014) at #10, and this year’s James Cook’s Lost World at #2. I assume that with the success of the latest novel people are buying the first two volumes to read them in sequence. Good.

The other thing these novels have in common is that I edited all three.

Spookily, of the 10 novels on the longlist for the 2015 Ngaio Marsh Awards for NZ crime fiction, I edited three: Paddy Richardson’s Swimming in the Dark, Tina Shaw’s The Children’s Pond and Paul Thomas’s Fallout.

Three must be my lucky number. On the other hand, I am lucky in the authors I get to work with.