The Fifth to Die

3.5 stars

This book is nowhere near as good as The Fourth Monkey. Not by a long shot. I enjoyed it, but I definitely don’t believe it justifies the copious five-star reviews it has on Goodreads.

The premise is beautiful. When police discover the body of a girl, who’s been missing for about three weeks, under the surface of a frozen lake, and you find out that lake’s been frozen solid for three MONTHS, it’s the perfect hook! Expertly crafted. And when you read the explanation for that shortly after, it’s wonderfully satisfying.

But then the story goes downhill. It’s not as dark or psychologically thrilling or suspenseful as the first one. It’s convoluted, with lots of characters and plot points, which can be confusing.

Another problem is, whereas in the previous book, we knew everything about the killer’s motive from the start, we don’t find out the motive in THIS book until almost at the end, and when we do, it’s in a few short, “blink-and-you’ll-miss-them” paragraphs.

There’s also some jargon that, being unfamiliar with the genre, and not being American, I struggled with. The first is the word “unsub”, which, I must be honest, I’d never in my life heard before. The first time I read it, I kinda figured it probably referred to the suspect, but it wasn’t clear what it stood for. The book itself never explains, and by the fifth chapter, I couldn’t take it anymore and Googled (for anyone who’s curious, it’s short for “unidentified subject” [which is stupidly, unnecessarily PC, if you ask me], and apparently everyone knows that).

Another term, used in the FBI, is the designation “SAIC” — as in, “SAIC John Smith”. That one... ja, I had no clue. Head-scratch moment. I mean, how am I supposed to even pronounce that? S-A-I-C? Syke? Sice (to rhyme with nice)? Thankfully, someone eventually mentions that character’s title in full, but only much later in the book: Special Agent in Charge... Erm. Nope. I don’t think I’d have ever gotten that on my own! Not in a million years….

If you know me, you’ll know that, as an IT person, probably my biggest bugbear with books, movies, and TV shows, is when people oversimplify IT related things... or worse, just get them plain wrong. Like the idea that a security system with a “half gig” (i.e. 512 MiB) of storage can store two days’ worth of Full HD (1080p) video. No. Just no. You’d be very lucky to get an hour. More likely, you’ll only get half an hour.

Look, I’m sure a surgeon might read this book and roll their eyes in places. Or a toxicologist in others. But those are highly specialised disciplines: in 2020, practically everyone uses some sort of computer (smartphones and tablets count) every single day of their lives. And if you use a computer every day of your life, there really is no excuse for lacking an intrinsic, instinctual understanding of what a “byte” is. I mean, you know what a metre/foot is, don’t you?

The story gets super exciting again at around 90%, at which point I couldn’t put it down. When I was at around that point, I skimmed through the Goodreads reviews, and saw someone talking about there being a cliffhanger at the end. My first reaction was to groan and think, “I HATE cliffhangers.” I’ve been hellbent on giving a book five stars before, only to immediately and irrevocably bump it down to one star, because of a cliffhanger.

But it’s not that bad, actually; not really a “cliffhanger”, per se. All the threads and plot points in this story get tied up and resolved. It’s just that right at the end, it introduces a brand new plot point, and then ends. So it sets up the premise of the next instalment nicely, but there’s no real “cliffhanger”. And I quite enjoyed that.

In short, it’s a solid story. Perhaps the copyediting could have used some love (missing words, mostly), but it’s a solid story. It’s just that it’s not worth the sheer volume of gushing five-star reviews you see on Goodreads.

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