What is Promise Whittaker doing now? (25 cents)

In case you don't know, Promise Whittaker is the central character in Mary Kay Zuravleff's "The Bowl is Already Broken", a 2005 novel that ranks today number 338,420 in the amazon.com listing of books by number of sales.

Are there 338,419 better books on the market? No, way.

This novel, written by a friend of my wife's, is the story of Ms. Whittaker, a scholar of medieval Persian poetry who finds herself very unexpectedly named acting director of an Asian Art Museum on the Mall (that is in everything but name, the Freer) at the time there is a crisis threatening the museum's existence. Balancing the eccentricities of the museum's staffers, with the demands of her two elementary school children, and her husband who works at Amnesty International and looks at everything from a global political perspective, she needs to find a way to explain how a priceless Chinese vase is dropped and shattered at a public ceremony, and to understand why the Smithsonian wants to close the museum and move the art work to the National Gallery. To make matters more complicated, Promise finds out that she, at age 43 and quite unexpectedly is pregnant, that one of her top researchers has embezzled thousands of dollars from her travel account, and that the Castle wants to turn the museum building into a food court, that her predecessor has been kidnapped on an archeological dig in a remote and hardly civilized country. What more can go wrong?

The book is very engrossing, very clever, extremely well written, and hard to put down.

Eighteen readers commented on the Amazon site. Seventeen of the eighteen gave the book 5 stars or just about 5 stars. One reader gave it zero stars and said it was the worst book ever. Were it not for this one review, this book would have been a five star book. So, why is it number 338,420?