SEEING RED: Kate Morton's latest Gothic-tinged mystery, "The Secret Keeper," cracks the list this week at No. It's Morton's first hardcover best seller (after an eight-month run on the trade paperback list for "The Forgotten Garden," a book-club favorite), and it's sure to cement her status in her native Australia, where her novels are the most successful literary exports since Colleen McCullough's "Thorn Birds" stormed the world in 1977. Morton has obvious star power. She's young, modest and beautiful - with "the best legs in the business," according to her husband - and her books, behind their soothing pastoral covers, offer plenty of plot twists and soapy at­mospherics. She also has a righteous temper, as she told S Magazine a few years ago: "There was a time when seeing red was part of my daily life. When the post office sold me star-shaped Christmas cards without advertising the fact that they required more expensive stamps, I refused to pay the extra. When the bus driver pulled away just as I made my puffed arrival at the bus stop, I cussed like a lumberjack. And when my share-house neighbors threw loud parties on weeknights, I felt no compunction about marching next door in my pj's to lay down the law. Terrible behavior, to be sure. MY PRIVILEGE: Chrystia Freeland's "Plutocrats," about the rise of the 0.1 percent and the fall of everybody else, is new on the hardcover nonfiction list at No. Freeland told NPR last month that many of the economic elites she interviewed resist President Obama's call for higher taxes because they associate wealth with honor and integrity. "In America, we have equated personal business success with public virtue," she said. And what I think has entered the political discourse now, and I think the president has been one of the people pushing this, is he's saying wait a minute. What is good for the guys at the very top is not necessarily good for the people in the middle. . . . I think it's actually an existential threat. People don't just want to be rich and successful, they want to be good. And I think it's really threatening to feel like, wow, you mean I'm not as full of virtue and goodness as I thought I was? NOTORIOUS: What Justin Bieber is to today's tween girls, the Duran Duran bassist John Taylor was to their mothers in the 1980s. This is the guy whose picture was pasted (or hair-gelled) in middle school lockers everywhere, and whose videos were in near-constant rotation on MTV. So it's not hard to guess which readers have propelled his autobiography - titled, dubiously, "In the Pleasure Groove" - to No. 6 on the hardcover nonfiction list. Hint: A lot of them probably have E. L. James on their e-readers. As it happens, Taylor's editor at Dutton, Jill Schwartzman, was herself a fan. "Women of my generation, we all loved Duran Duran in general, but women just loved John," she told The Hollywood Reporter. I was at my friend's 40th birthday a few months ago. We're all dancing, and a Duran Duran song came on. I was about to meet John for the first time the next day, and I said to my friends: "Guess who I'm having lunch with tomorrow? John Taylor. They all screamed so loudly, I can't even tell you. On MTV's Hive Web site recently, Taylor admitted the band had taken its hairstyles very seriously. "Every three months we had to come up with a new look," he said. It wasn't just videos. There were album covers and picture discs and posters. We had to come up with a new identity, a new band persona, for every photo shoot. . . . We had to completely reinvent the look of the band at least four times a year. And that's a lot of work.