The Fifth Victim
by Beverly Barton
Zebra, 352 pages, paperback, 2008
Oh dear.
A small Tennessee town: Cherokee Pointe. A killer starts sacrificially murdering young women. Maverick FBI agent Dallas Sloan (rippling thews, unruly shock of blond hair, never found a woman who could tame him; get the idea?) recognizes the m.o. and arrives seeking vengeance for the killing of his niece by this same murderer the previous year in a different state. He's the only person in the FBI who's noticed there's a killer on the loose whose m.o. is to sacrificially murder four women in a row and then do the same to a fifth but with the extra feature of ripping her heart out for later cannibalistic consumption.
Here in Cherokee Pointe, though, the local law forces have what would seem to be, were it not that the local Chief of Police is a sinecured halfwit, a considerable advantage: local psychic Genny Madoc (petite, pert breasts, never found a man worth letting inside her pants; get the idea again?) can intermittently tap into the killer's mind and witness his vile deeds. Now, if only she could get a street address ...
Although Dallas thinks "psychics" are all phonies or crazies, from the moment they first clap eyes on each other the electricity sparks between him and Genny with such intensity Van de Graaff would have trashed his own generator in jealous disgust. It's obvious that, unless one or other actually bursts into flames first, they're going to have a monumental sex scene about three-quarters of the way through the book, and, golly gosh, so they do.
Alas, just about everything else is equally predictable except quite how much direr, at any particular point, the book can get from here on.
The Fifth Victim is by intention a serial-killer chiller, a mystery and a semi-erotic romance novel – all three. To take these aspects in turn: The serial-killer aspect is so hokey (oh, lumme: satanist cults) it'd have seemed a trifle passé in, say, 1953. The mystery's flaccid: the murderer's the guy you thought, then thought might be the Red Herring because he's so bloody obvious.
And the erotica? Oh, geez. The Genny/Dallas megaromp is surprisingly OK, but elsewhere the liberal sexual references, plus the fairly frequent lesser sex scenes, are so clumsy and dumb it's hard to know whether to burst out laughing or into tears. And the main characters have astonishingly high Allure Quotients. Perhaps people have stronger sex urges in Tennessee: not one but several of the characters possess such a powerful aura of sexuality that they leave members of the opposite gender in a state of high arousal merely by walking by or speaking on the phone.
This is a book that leaves you begging for less.
Oh dear.
—Crescent Blues