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Booksellers Feed Imports to Mystery’s Hungry Fans

At a time of price wars and pressure from electronic books, a group of independent bookstores has found at least one way to lure customers into paying premium prices for a hardcover title: import an eagerly awaited book from Britain several months before its release in the United States and then jack up the price.

Coming on the heels of the breakout success of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” the first two volumes in the posthumously published thriller trilogy by the Swedish author Stieg Larsson, booksellers are now importing British editions of “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” the third volume in the bestselling series six months before its publication here.

Charging as much as $45 for the book, which sells on Amazon in Britain for £8.99 (about $14.75), some booksellers have sold more than a hundred copies each.

The imports are attracting fans like Joan Morgenstern, a retired property manager in Houston who had already torn through the first two books in the series and was eager to read the third when she discovered that her favorite bookstore in Houston, Murder by the Book, imported several copies of the British hardcover version shortly after it was published in October.

Ms. Morgenstern, 64, paid $40 for her copy and read it over the Thanksgiving holiday. “I’ve never been extremely patient when it comes to stuff I can find and read,” she said.

In response to many similarly impatient Stieg Larsson fans, eager to read the latest action-packed adventures of angry punk hacker Lisbeth Salander and the haggard journalist Mikael Blomkvist, several independent bookstores across the country have been importing the British editions of “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” published by MacLehose Press, an imprint of Quercus Publishing, and reselling them. The United States publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, will not release the book until the end of May.

The importing has been so widespread that the British edition of “Hornet’s Nest” tied for No. 5 on the best-seller list of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association in the United States in October.

In Manhattan outlets including Partners & Crime, a mystery bookstore in the West Village, and the Mysterious Bookshop, in TriBeCa, have brought in British editions for customers.

Kizmin Reeves, co-owner of Partners & Crime, said she has sold close to 80 copies of the book. She bought them, as anyone can, on Amazon.co.uk. After adding shipping costs and a profit margin, she has been charging $45 for the 602-page hardcover.

Bridget Lennon, an interior designer for retail stores, visited the shop last week to buy a copy of “Hornet’s Nest” as a Christmas present for her fiancé. “You put down the first one, and you want to read the second; and you put down the second, and you want to read the third,” Ms. Lennon, 27, said. Although she said the $45 price tag was steep, she figured that by the time she, her fiancé, her fiancé’s sister and his father had all read it, “between the three or four of us that we know immediately who want to read it, it will pay off eventually.”

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Partners & Crime, a mystery bookstore in the West Village, is selling the British edition of the third volume in the Stieg Larsson series. Kizmin Reeves, the shop's co-owner, said she bought them, as anyone can, on Amazon.co.uk.Credit...Richard Perry/The New York Times

Ms. Reeves said she did not understand “how the American publisher got so behind the eight ball on their publishing schedule.”

Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf, said the company wanted to allow interest to build as more and more readers discovered the first two volumes in the series.

“The sales on Book 1 and Book 2 are so strong that you wouldn’t want to add Book 3 to the mix immediately,” Mr. Bogaards said. According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” has sold 764,000 copies in hardcover and paperback in the United States, and “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” which came out here in July, has sold 199,000 copies in hardcover. That book was the first work in translation to go to No. 1 on The New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list in 25 years. (The last one was “The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco.)

The series, with its highly idiosyncratic protagonists and reportorial detail, has garnered critical praise along with a growing fan base. In a review of “The Girl Who Played with Fire” in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that the series worked because “Mr. Larsson’s two central characters, Salander and Blomkvist, transcend their genre and insinuate themselves in the reader’s mind through their oddball individuality, their professional competence and, surprisingly, their emotional vulnerability.”

Knopf’s announced print run for “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” scheduled for a May 25 release, is 500,000 copies.

Mr. Larsson, a journalist, completed the three manuscripts just before he died in 2004. Sonny Mehta, chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, first heard about the books at the Frankfurt Book Fair and bought the United States rights from the British publisher in 2007. He said he wished American booksellers would refrain from importing the British edition of the third volume. “I’d much rather they bought our edition,” he said. “But I can understand the impatience.”

David Thompson, a bookseller at Murder by the Book in Houston, said customers were already buying “Hornet’s Nest” on their own from Amazon.co.uk and other online retailers. “It’s not fair to not be able to offer the same books that people can get online,” he said. The store has sold 150 copies, obtained through a British wholesaler.

While bookshops, particularly those that focus on mystery series, often import a handful of British editions of various titles for collectors, they are bringing in many more copies of “Hornet’s Nest,” where demand has stretched far beyond collectors.

Some bookstores are selling it quietly so as not to irk the United States publisher. “I’m not shouting it from the mountaintop,” said Stan Hynds, a book buyer at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vt. Mr. Hynds said the store had shelved its copies of “Hornet’s Nest” in the mystery section rather than displaying them prominently at the front of the store. So far it has sold eight copies.

Such importing happens occasionally but usually not in large numbers. Scholastic, the United States publisher of the Harry Potter books, had to ask distributors not to bring in British editions on the first three volumes of the series, when the books were published there first. By the fourth volume, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” the book was published simultaneously in Britain and the United States.

Many independent bookstores, though deluged with requests from customers, have decided not to import British editions of “Hornet’s Nest,” mainly to preserve their relationships with Knopf. “If we need their help with something, it’s always good to be on their good side,” said Gerry Donaghy, new-book purchasing supervisor at Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Booksellers Feed Imports To Mystery’s Hungry Fans. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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