There’s been an incident at the Pennsylvania State Prison. A number of people choked to death without warning in the visitor zone. The multiple homicides might fit the overall profile of the killer they’re after, but Detectives Azzaro and Diaz know better. There’s something much more sinister going on in Blood Tree #5. Writer Peter J. Tomasi reaches the penultimate chapter in his police procedural in a story brought to the page by Maxim Šimić. John Kalisz’s colors provide depth and texture to the dark world of a serial killer and the two men who are trying to bring him to justice.

It was potassium chloride in the water cooler at the visitor zone. A concentration of the chemical in the body shuts down the nervous system. Muscles stop. Lungs stop. Hearts stop. But it’s not the killer that they’re after, is it? The angel wings drawn on the bottoms of the water cooler cups would suggest otherwise: their killer is beginning to improvise. Elsewhere, a man is commanding people to don angel wings from an observation deck on the Empire State Building. They all repeat the same thing. Then they jump. Diaz calls up Azzaro. He tells him that it’s raining people wearing angel wings in Manhattan. Things are starting to get gruesome. 

The basic symbolism in Tomasi’s story is solid enough to carry the plot. The idea of people dropping out of the sky wearing angel wings is a pretty dark vision to begin with. The rationale behind the murders lends some weight to the themes being explored. Tomasi frames the action quite well, but without focusing all that much on the actual tragedy of the murders. There’s no question that there's horror in mass murder, but without a wider-angle look at the carnage that’s being presented, it all feels at least a little abstract. 

Šimić delivers the mystery and the horror to the page with heavy shadows from heavy ink. The darkness would feel a bit more intense in art that felt a bit higher in resolution. It’s all so moody and gloopy that the horror of what’s going on hits the page with a dreamy quality that never quite feels as intense as it should. That being said, the actual composition of every panel is well thought-out. The overall layout of the page and the pacing of the action is suitably impressive as well. 

Tomasi plays with expectations. Some of the revelations that hit the page in the penultimate issue feel pretty obvious. Some of them hit like a hammer. Tomasi and Šimić have a solidly haunting story that they’re bringing to the page, but the finer points of it seem drowned in the dreamy nightmare of a story that never quite manages to provide the proper perspective. There’s something deeper being explored between the homicides and the men who are investigating them, but any insight into that seems firmly planted outside the panels.

Grade: B-