The Fifth Assassin by Brad Meltzer

I’m about a week late in doing this review and had to turn the book back into the library so I’ll probably make some errors of omission and forgetfulness. Sorry. As best I can tell, this is the third in a series with a lot of plot carryover from #2, The Inner Circle.

The story revolves around a staff member or three of the US Archives. Beecher White has been newly recruited (from his performance in the prior book, I presume) into a shadowy clan of individuals whose purpose is to protect the Presidency called the Culper Ring. This group was originally set up by George Washington and has been operational ever since. Of note is that the ring is to protect ‘the Presidency’, not ‘the President.’

Looks like the prior book, The Inner Circle, had an attempt on President Orson Wallace, killing his wife instead. Now the dead first lady haunts the mind of the assassin Nico Hadrian who is under lock and key at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in DC; home of the seriously insane and deranged.

In a bizarre twist of fates (and almost beyond belief), Nico and daughter Clementine (now cancer-ridden), Beecher, and an investigator for the US Government Accounting Office (Marshall) were all from the same town in Wisconsin. All three fathers served in the same unit during the Vietnam war, and all were somewhat part and parcel to an damning incident back in the mid 1960s.

A serial killer is recreating the four assassinations of US Presidents, obviously headed toward killing President Wallace. Beecher starts to see the pattern quickly and acts to intervene, but gets cut off by the Secret Service, the POTUS himself, Celementine, and Marshall at one point or another. Beecher isn’t crazy about President Wallace and apparently the feeling is mutual (more carry over from Inner Circle, I guess), but is determined to stop the coming attempt on Wallace.

Anyway, Beecher chases a lead to Camp David while the real assassin has tracked the POTUS to the Lincoln Memorial where Marshall takes him down. But there were enough loose ends to guarantee a sequel.

You can probably tell I wasn’t a big fan of the book. I thought the structure of the story used cheap cliffhangers at each chapter. It also needlessly jumped between the doings of the various chapters and from 20-30yrs earlier to the present, such that you might go through 4 or 5 chapters before getting back with whatever character being presented; hard to juggle the various sub-stories. To be fair, I think it might've been better had I read Inner Circle first. Meltzer may have a string of best sellers, but personally, while the story was pretty clever, the delivery was a little too much like cheezy supermarket novels that I tend to avoid, at least I try to.

East Coast Don