Audiobook Review: The Fifth to Die by J.D. Barker
The Fifth to Die
Series: 4MK #2
Author: J.D. Barker
Narrators:
Edoardo Ballerini
Graham Winton
Published: July 10, 2018
Audiobook: 15 hours 7 minutes
Reviewed By: Jessica
Dates Read: August 5-16, 2026
Jessica’s Rating: 4.5 stars
Book Description:
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.
Jessica’s Review:
J.D. Barker is back with the second 4MK novel The Fifth to Die. Fifth picks up four months after the ending of Fourth and this time we have more gruesome deaths, multiple storylines, multiple povs (which you know by now that I love!), and even better: multiple bad guys! And an addition which could be just as frightening as 4MK himself: None other than Bishop’s mother! We really can see how the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree with her added to the mix. We learn more about Porter in Fifth and he is determined to find Bishop’s mother. He actually goes rogue with this determination. We have two police storylines, one for each killer.
There is a lot going on in this novel and it is just as fast paced as Fourth and you just wonder HOW did some of these things with the missing girls happen when it doesn’t seem plausible? But yet these things DID in fact happen. Yes, we do get answers.
This new killer is just as frightening and messed up as Bishop. They are fabulous villains, but I always enjoy the villains! It makes you wonder just what does that say about me? I thank my dad for not restricting my reading as a teen (unlike my tv and movie viewings) and as a 14, 15, and 16-year-old I was reading Stephen King. Of course my love of thrillers started with the Fear Street books by RL Stine when I was younger. I am on the tail end of Gen X, and this is just how we grew up and we would not change it for anything!
This was my second reading of Fifth and this time I listened to the audiobook. Both Edoardo Ballerini and Graham Winton return as narrators and once more they are superb! I am happy to share that they narrate the final book in this trilogy! And speaking of the final book, Fifth ends in a cliffhanger, but readers are fortunate now to not have to wait for the final in this trilogy.
Many thanks to JD. Barker and his publisher for sending me paperback copies of this trilogy!