After movie deal, Harlan Coben's 'Fool Me Once' is back at No. 1

Here’s a look at what’s new on Paste BN’s Best-Selling Books list…

‘Once,’ twice: Harlan Coben is on a roll. His latest thriller, Fool Me Once (Dutton), repeats at No. 1 on Paste BN’s Best-Selling Books list for the second straight week with the news that Julia Roberts will star in a movie adaptation. (The full list will publish on Thursday.)

In a Today show interview on March 30, Coben told Al Roker it was “ridiculously flattering” to get the call from Roberts, who had read his book in “two days” and was “really insightful” and “really gets Maya, which is so important.”

Fool Me Once, published on March 22, is the story of Maya Stern, a former special-ops Army pilot who witnesses her husband’s murder during a robbery. Left alone, she sets up a nanny cam, and then is shocked to see her supposedly dead husband playing with their 2-year-old daughter.

Roberts is also set to co-produce the film version with her partners through Red Om Films, according to Deadline.com. She co-stars with George Clooney in the Jodi Foster-directed thriller Money Monster, due in theaters in May.

This is the first Coben book from the viewpoint of a female protagonist. Coben told Roker he “wanted to write a normal, intelligent woman” character.

Coben has had 21 Paste BN best sellers, including two previous titles (Six Years and The Stranger) that landed at No. 1, as Fool Me Once did.

Meanwhile, Dutton will publish another new Coben title, Home, on Sept. 20. This is the first time he has produced two adult novels in one year.

In the new thriller, it’s 10 years after the kidnapping of two young boys — and only one returns home.

Maisie’s ‘Journey’: With Journey to Munich (Harper), the 12th book in her Maisie Dobbs mystery series, author Jacqueline Winspear has her highest showing ever on the list.

Journey lands this week at No. 6. Nine Winspear novels have made the list, and the Dobbs series has steadily been building a fan base. An Incomplete Revenge, the first to make Paste BN’s list, peaked at No. 134 in 2008; last year’s A Dangerous Place landed at No. 13.

The series began in post-World War I London; Maisie was a nurse during the war, then she became a detective. In Journey to Munich, it’s 1938, and Maisie has been enlisted by Britain’s Secret Service for a dangerous mission in Nazi Germany.

Paste BN’s Robert Bianco gave the new book ***½ out of four stars, calling it “taut, tense (and) beautifully written.”

Winspear is currently on a book tour in the USA that wraps up April 19 in Santa Rosa, Calif.