The Fifth to Die
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4.4 • 17 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
‘J.D. Barker is a one-of-a-kind writer and that’s a rare and special thing. Stephen King comes to mind and Lee Child, John Sanford. All one-of-a-kinds. Don’t miss anything J.D. writes.’ James Patterson
Murder. It’s a family affair.
In the midst of one of the worst winters Chicago has seen in years, the body of missing teenager Ella Reynolds is discovered under the surface of a frozen lake.
She’s been missing for three weeks… the lake froze over three months ago.
Detective Sam Porter and his team are brought in to investigate but it’s not long before another girl goes missing. The press believes the serial killer, Anson Bishop, has struck again but Porter knows differently. The deaths are too different, there’s a new killer on the loose.
Porter however is distracted. He’s still haunted by Bishop and his victims, even after the FBI have removed him from the case. His only leads: a picture of a female prisoner and a note from Bishop: ‘Help me find my mother. I think it’s time she and I talked.’
As more girls go missing and Porter’s team race to stop the body count rising, Porter disappears to track down Bishop’s mother and discover that the only place scarier than the mind of a serial killer is the mind of the mother from which he came.
Perfect for fans of Helen Fields, Val McDermid and Jo Nesbo this gripping and twisted thriller will have you wondering, how do you stop a killer when he’s been trained from birth?
Praise for The Fifth to Die:
‘J.D. Barker is a one-of-a-kind writer and that’s a rare and special thing. Stephen King comes to mind and Lee Child, John Sanford. All one-of-a-kinds. Don’t miss anything J.D. writes.’ James Patterson
‘Superbly paced, beautifully constructed evocation of evil’ Daily Mail
‘A gritty thriller that gets right under your skin’ HEAT
‘Chillingly written’ Woman
‘Barker spins a serpentine and sometimes gruesome
tale… Sparse and cinematic, the pages fly by.’ Press Association
About the author
J. D. BARKER is the international best-selling author of Forsaken, a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Debut Novel. In addition, he has been asked to coauthor a prequel to Dracula by the Stoker family. Barker splits his time between Englewood, Florida, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thomas Harris fans will find themselves on familiar ground in Barker's competent if unmemorable sequel to 2017's The Fourth Monkey, in which Anson Bishop, the so-called Four Monkey Killer, targeted the children of people he believed merited punishment, such as drug traffickers and kiddie porn dealers. Bishop eluded capture after managing to infiltrate the investigation of Chicago PD detective Sam Porter by posing as a CSI photographer. In this continuation, the discovery of the frozen corpse of 15-year-old Ella Reynolds, who's wearing another missing girl's clothes, leads the media to speculate that 4MK has returned, despite a changed m.o. Porter's search for his nemesis alternates with gruesome scenes from the perspective of girls abducted by a sadist, who repeatedly drowns and resuscitates them so they can describe the experience to him. The cliffhanger ending points to more mayhem in a third volume. Other authors have done the cat-and-mouse plot line better, and Barker falls short of making Bishop a worthy successor to Hannibal Lecter.
