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Title: The 5^th Horseman
Author: James Patterson & Maxine Paetro
Audiobook: 2006
Reader: Carolyn McCormack
Unabridged
Length: 8 hours

Ears: 3

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Riding in as the fifth installment of the Women’s Murder Club series, The 5th Horseman attempts a hat-trick: 3 genre stories in one novel. This attempt has varying levels of success.

The Women’s Murder Club is a group of San Francisco women, all in great jobs: a star reporter, medical examiner, as well as main character Lindsay Boxer, a police lieutenant on the SF police force. A new face, attorney Yuki Castellano, had joined the group. In this story you really don’t get the feeling that the women operate as a group to solve murders, which seemed more evident earlier on in the series. Yuki turns out to have a major role in the story and she seems to have the most personality of the group as well. I enjoyed the interaction between Yuki and her mother which included some good natured rifts on ethnic stereotypes.

A prolog to the book sets the stage in San Francisco Municipal Hospital for a medical serial killer type of story with the death of a patient. After the prolog the book quickly shifts to grisly murder of an unidentified young woman. The clothes that the victim was wearing are crucial clues. Are the two cases related?

As Lindsay’s rather straight forward police investigation (the type you might see on a good episode of Law & Order) continues a third plot unfolds, a high-profile medical malpractice case involving what may have been accidental deaths at the very same hospital. Now we have three plots going that may be intertwined: Medical serial killer suspense, courtroom trial, and police procedural.

I’m not one to give away plot details. Let’s just say one of the three plots ends suddenly in the middle of the book. There was no “cheating” the outcome seemed correct to me; they followed the clues and did good police work. But at the time, I was thinking, “so what?”

The other two plots did intersect; at least I think they did. It was a bit murky in the end. Each had a good twist that surprised me. You have to wait to the very end of the book, to get a big pay off. I saw some holes in the plot, but that’s ok.

I wasn’t quite as involved as I have been in some of the earlier books in this series. A couple of notes: 130 chapters, some of which were less than a minute long on audio, seem a bit over doing the chapter thing. Also, you don’t always have to tie in the title to the actual text, it does happen very late in the book in a way that made absolutely no sense to me.

Production values on the book were excellent with a great reading performance by a personal favorite of mine, Carolyn McCormick who has long been on Law & Order as Doctor Olivett. You have to get used to the first person narration that jumps from Lindsay to other characters.

For those of you who are not familiar with James Patterson and this series, I give this two ears. For Patterson fans this is four ears. So that averages out to three ears.

Reviewed on 4/12/06 by Robert W. Karp