Brad Meltzer's premise is the kind of thing that makes me sit up straight: what if the four successful presidential assassins weren't lone wolves but were connected across a hundred years of American history? That's a horror premise wearing a thriller's clothes, and I was genuinely excited to dig into this one.
Here's the thing, though. The Fifth Assassin doesn't fully commit to its own best idea.
The Conspiracy That Almost Was
Meltzer clearly did his homework. The man graduated from Columbia Law, writes comics, does non-fiction - he's a researcher at heart, and you can feel it. The historical threads connecting Booth, Guiteau, Czolgosz, and Oswald are genuinely fascinating when he lets them breathe. Beecher White as our archivist-hero navigating Washington's hidden corridors scratches a very specific itch for me - I spend my days surrounded by stacks and card catalogs, so a protagonist who weaponizes library skills? I'm predisposed to root for this guy.
But Meltzer has a habit of dangling mystery threads and then yanking them away before you can pull. The central question - who is the fifth assassin and what's the real pattern connecting these killings - gets buried under layers of conspiracy that feel like they're building toward a revelation that never quite lands with the force it should. At 14 hours, there's real estate here for a slow burn that earns its payoff. Instead, you get a lot of chapters that feel like they're stalling, circling the same questions Beecher's already asked three times.
I kept comparing this in my head to something like Caleb Carr's The Alienist, which takes a similar "historical crimes, modern investigation" structure but trusts its reader enough to let the dread accumulate organically. Meltzer's approach is more frantic - every chapter ending wants to be a cliffhanger, every revelation wants to be a bombshell. When everything's a bombshell, nothing is.
Scott Brick in Perpetual Crisis Mode
So. Scott Brick. I've listened to Brick narrate other things - the man can absolutely perform when the material and the direction align. His work on Robert Littell's The Company is genuinely excellent, measured and intelligent. But here? He reads nearly every sentence like it's the climax of the book. By hour three, I was exhausted. Not the good kind of exhausted, the "I've been at a haunted house where every room has a jump scare" kind.
The character differentiation issue is real. Beecher, his allies, the antagonists - they all live in roughly the same vocal register with roughly the same intensity. In a thriller with this many players and this many competing agendas, that's a problem. I lost track of who was speaking more than once, especially during dialogue-heavy stretches. Had to rewind twice during a late-night session at my kitchen table (Shirley was asleep on the counter, completely unbothered, as always).
Brick's strengths do show up in the action sequences. When the plot actually moves - when Beecher's in genuine physical danger or uncovering something tangible - the energy works. The over-dramatization that kills quieter scenes actually serves the tense ones. It's just that a 14-hour audiobook can't sustain that register without burning you out.
Who This Actually Works For
If you're a commuter or a road-tripper who wants something that demands minimal concentration to follow, this is genuinely solid for that. The pacing, while repetitive in structure, keeps you from drifting too far. And the historical assassination details - even when the fictional framework around them wobbles - are interesting enough to keep your brain chewing.
But if you're looking for horror-adjacent conspiracy fiction that actually delivers on its premise's creepiest implications? The idea that four assassins across a century were orchestrated by the same shadowy force? That's a premise that deserves to be terrifying, and Meltzer plays it more like a network TV procedural than the paranoid nightmare it could've been. The slow-building dread I wanted here - that sense of wrongness that accumulates before you can name it - is exactly what Dark Horses does so well, and finishing that one genuinely rattled me in a way this never quite managed.
I kept thinking about how Shirley Jackson would've handled this material. She wouldn't've explained nearly as much. She would've let the connections between the assassins speak for themselves and trusted the reader to feel the wrongness. Meltzer explains and explains and explains, and somewhere in all that explaining, the dread leaks out.
One for the Maybe Pile
I didn't regret my 14 hours. But I didn't lose sleep either, and for a book about a secret conspiracy of presidential assassins, that feels like a missed opportunity. The premise is A-tier. The execution is solidly B-minus. And Brick's narration - when it works, it works, but it needed a director whispering "less" in his ear about sixty percent of the time.
My podcast listeners who love historical thrillers will find enough here to enjoy. But this isn't the one I'll be pushing in the group chat at midnight.
