Review: The Fifth to Die by J.D. Barker

Author: JD Barker
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date of publication: July 2018

Detective Porter and the team have been pulled from the hunt for Anson Bishop, the Four Monkey Killer, by the feds. When the body of a young girl is found beneath the frozen waters of Jackson Park Lagoon, she is quickly identified as Ella Reynolds, missing three weeks. But how did she get there? The lagoon froze months earlier. More baffling? She’s found wearing the clothes of another girl, missing less than two days. While the detectives of Chicago Metro try to make sense of the quickly developing case, Porter secretly continues his pursuit of 4MK, knowing the best way to find Bishop is to track down his mother. When the captain finds out about Porter’s activities, he’s suspended, leaving his partners Clair and Nash to continue the search for the new killer alone.

Obsessed with catching Bishop, Porter follows a single grainy photograph from Chicago to the streets of New Orleans and stumbles into a world darker than he could have possibly imagined, where he quickly realizes that the only place more frightening than the mind of a serial killer is the mind of the mother from which he came.

The Fifth to Die is the second book in the 4MK Thriller series.  I loved the first book, The Fourth Monkey, and was eagerly waiting to get my hands on this one.  Sam Porter is back and he and his team are on the hunt for a new killer who has been kidnapping girls and killing them.  Porter is still trying to hunt down the 4MK killer.  Once again, this author has knocked it out of the park.  It is always refreshing to read a good thriller that keeps me guessing.

The one thing I loved about this book as well as the first.  There are a lot of twists and I called none of them.  Every plot point was given out to the reader in exactly the right time frame so that there was not a lot of foreshadowing to give away anything too soon.  The story is told through multiple perspectives and sometimes that can be confusing.  I didn't really mind it in this instance.  It was almost necessary to get the whole story out.  I'm not going to talk plot points here because I don't want to give anything away. The book ends on a huge cliff hanger.  I need the next book as soon as possible because I need answers!   I highly recommend this one as well as the first.