The 6th Target — A Women's Murder Club Thriller

Violence on the Water

The 6th Target, the sixth Women’s Murder Club novel, opens with one of the series’ most shocking sequences: a gunman opens fire on a crowded San Francisco commuter ferry, turning an ordinary crossing into a massacre. The randomness of the attack — strangers cut down without warning, in a place no one expects danger — gives the opening a particular horror, and Patterson and co-author Maxine Paetro sharpen it considerably by placing one of the people Lindsay Boxer loves among the wounded. The violence is not abstract; it strikes the ensemble directly, and that personal blow reverberates through the rest of the book.

Endangering a member of the club is the novel’s smartest move. The series has spent five books building the reader’s investment in these women and the people around them, and The 6th Target cashes in that investment by making the ferry shooting personal. The case is no longer a professional assignment but a wound to the group itself, and Lindsay’s pursuit of the shooter carries the fury and fear of someone whose own circle has been attacked. The emotional stakes are higher here than in several of the surrounding entries.

Children Disappearing

Alongside the ferry investigation runs a second, equally disturbing case: children are vanishing from San Francisco’s wealthy neighborhoods, taken by someone who knows exactly how to disappear with them. Child abduction strikes a primal fear, and the novel uses it to generate a dread distinct from the shock of the ferry shooting — a slow, creeping horror as the club races to find the missing before it is too late. The two cases give The 6th Target its twin engines, cutting between the hunt for a mass shooter and the search for a child predator.

The dual structure is the series’ familiar approach, and it cuts both ways. The two cases keep the momentum relentless, and each taps a different vein of fear — random public violence and the targeted theft of children. But they also compete for attention, and neither develops with quite the depth a single focus would allow. The abduction case in particular, with its genuinely chilling premise, could have anchored a book on its own; sharing the stage with the ferry investigation, it gets less room than it deserves. As ever, the breakneck pace is both the appeal and the limitation.

The Club Under Strain

With one of their own among the ferry victims, the Women’s Murder Club faces the kind of strain that tests friendship. The series has always drawn its warmth from the loyalty among Lindsay, Claire, Yuki, and Cindy, and The 6th Target puts that loyalty under pressure, showing how the group rallies when one of them is hurt. The emotional texture of the book — the fear, the support, the determination to protect one another — is what distinguishes the Women’s Murder Club from grimmer crime fiction, and it gives the dual-case plot a human center.

Yuki’s courtroom work provides a third thread, though it is thinner than the two investigations and functions more as a reminder of the prosecutor’s role than as a fully developed storyline. The series continues to rotate its spotlight among the four women, and while not every thread gets equal weight, the ensemble approach keeps the books feeling populated and warm even amid the darkness of their cases.

Stakes and Speed

The 6th Target is one of the more emotionally charged entries in the early-to-mid run, precisely because it dares to hurt the ensemble directly. The ferry shooting’s personal toll gives the book a weight that the procedural mechanics alone could not, and the child-abduction case supplies a parallel dread. Patterson’s short chapters keep both plots moving at the series’ characteristic clip, and the San Francisco setting provides its reliable atmosphere of fog, hills, and neighborhoods rendered with efficient specificity.

The resolution, as is typical of the series, prioritizes momentum over slow-burn intricacy, and readers who prize tightly fair-played mysteries may find the wrap-up brisk. But the emotional investment carries the book past its plotting shortcuts, and the combination of shocking violence, primal fear, and ensemble loyalty makes The 6th Target a gripping, if not especially intricate, thriller.

Where It Sits in the Series

The 6th Target is the sixth Women’s Murder Club novel and one of the more personally charged early-to-mid entries, following The 5th Horseman and preceding 7th Heaven. It reads best in sequence, since the ensemble’s history and the personal stakes of the ferry shooting carry weight from the earlier books. For readers tracking the club, this is the entry where the series’ willingness to endanger its own becomes a central source of tension.

Among the Women’s Murder Club novels, The 6th Target stands out for its shocking opening and its dual veins of fear, even as its competing cases spread it a little thin. It is a propulsive, emotionally grounded thriller that reminds readers the series’ real stakes are the women at its heart.

The ferry shooting in particular reflects a willingness, on the series’ part, to break its own comfort. The Women’s Murder Club books are warmer and more companionable than Patterson’s Alex Cross novels, and that warmth could easily curdle into complacency — a sense that the four friends are too safe, too insulated, for the danger to feel real. The 6th Target refuses that complacency by turning the violence directly on the group, and the choice pays off in tension that the series’ lighter entries lack. When the reader knows that even a beloved member of the club can be cut down without warning, every subsequent threat carries more weight. It is a calculated risk, and it gives this entry a charge that distinguishes it from the more routine cases around it.

Our rating: 3.8/5 — A high-stakes Women’s Murder Club thriller that opens with a shocking ferry shooting striking the ensemble and braids it with a chilling child-abduction case.