This is fine addition to the Women’s Murder Club series. The whole gang is here, Lindsay, Claire, Cindy and the latest addition Yuki.  Lindsay might be my favorite fictional female detective these days and the group makes for a wonderful series as stories later move forward to book #22 in 2021. 

5th Horseman 
by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
2006 – (432 pages) 
Read by Carolyn McCormick 8h 5m
Rating:  A+ /legal-procedural thriller 
# 5 of The Women’s Murder Club series 

The story begins with a Prologue in which a woman patient in a San Francisco hospital dies. She’d had a heart problem while swimming with her young daughter and was taken to ER at Municipal Hospital. She’s dies as someone named the Night Walker watches, cleans up, puts coins with medical symbols on her eyes, bids her goodnight and leaves in the shadows. 

Also Yuki’s mother collapses and is taken to Metropolitan Hospital where it’s found she has had a TIA and will be kept there for a few days. The hospital is currently being sued for negligence and malpractice. 

But when Chapter 1 really starts Lindsay Boxer is at her desk and gets a call from Conklin and his new partner who are at a parking garage where they have discovered a dead woman in a new Cadillac. They go to check it out. 

And thus it goes with two main crimes for Lindsay to work on and the jury trial about the hospital.  Claire is there to help Lindsay with the medical bits, Cindy wants the updates and insights re the trial or anything else she can scoop,  But after her mother dies, Yuki wants help getting justice for her mother.  

As is often the case, I discovered The Women’s Murder Club series by reading a Christmas book, 19th Christmas. Okay – I enjoyed that and tried others. I didn’t much care for anything prior to Maxine Praeto so I continued after book #4, 4th of July.

The things I like about this series is that each book is both a police procedural and a courtroom drama. The action never really stops for more than a few minutes so the books are really hard to put down. And finally, the cast works so wonderfully together.  I’m not fond of Patterson on his own because he seems to get too edgy- violent. But with Paetro there’s an added element of a wee bit of softness. 

The narrator in this case was very good. the only thing I didn’t like about it was the music in the background. When I’m listening to a book I want it to sound like the story in my head when I rad it in a book. That is not at all like a movie!