The Fourth Monkey

The Gruesome Killer

The Chicago police have their work cut out as a bizarre serial killer has been at work for five years, leaving no trace behind.  JD Barker’s The Fourth Monkey is gory in the extreme, and not for the faint of heart.

He kidnaps young female victims, to torture and chop up; following the Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil principle, he sends the victims’ families their ears, eyes and tongues, which he cuts when they are still alive and adding a fourth rule of Do No Evil, leaves their mutilated bodies for the police to find. It turns out that a member of the victims’ family had committed a crime, and the killer has taken it on himself to punish them by killing their child. The cops have named him the four monkey killer or 4MK.

Detective Sam Porter is woken up one morning by his partner Brian Nash, because a man has been run over by a bus, and he was carrying an ear in a white box tied with a black sting, just like the one 4MK uses. The dead man just might be the killer they have been hunting for. His latest victim, Emory, might still be alive and they have to find her before she dies. She is the hidden illegitimate daughter of a rich, powerful and unscrupulous businessman, Arthur Talbot, which makes her 4MK’s target.

Porter finds a diary in the dead man’s pocket, in which he has written about his own childhood and his psychopathic parents. The chapters of the book then intersperse the search for the killer with Emory’s struggles in a dark, rat-infested room, and the diary of the killer which is truly stomach-churning, the way his parents torture and kill a man; in the midst of it all, Porter’s wife is killed in a store burglary gone wrong.

For a tiny bit of humour, there’s a rookie CSI man called Watson, whom Porter calls Doctor and he protests that he isn’t one. Porter sighs about people not reading any more (or Watson would have got the Sherlock Holmes reference).

The book is a perverse take on the vigilante theme, the killer believes he is fighting evil, but his methods are horrific. Since the next book The Fifth To Die has been announced at the end of this book, it would be no spoiler to say that 4MK isn’t done yet.  

The Fourth Monkey

By JD Barker

Publisher:

Pages:416