Hello Beautiful People! Welcome to another review! For this review, I get into a new thriller mystery series titled The Fourth Monkey by J.D Barker, the first book in his 4MK Thriller series. The series closely follows the detectives and the killer who are all intertwined in this mystery, also giving perspectives from each side.
Main Characters:
- Detective Sam Porter: Is the main detective working on the 4MK Killer case in which a local killer goes after those close to people they believe have sinned, is thrown for a loop when it seems like the killer is dropped in front of them
- Emory Connors: A teenage girl who is the latest victim of the 4MK Killer, gives us a perspective of the horror he enacts on his victims
My Review
I definitely enjoyed The Fourth Monkey by J.D Barker. It’s honestly a bit hard to get too chatty into the plot without spoiling things because this book definitely has a bit of a levelled mystery to it. It’s not overly complicated or hard to understand, but as soon as I expose one thing, I expose so much more so I don’t want to expose too much for people interested in checking it out. I found the mystery to be a bit average in parts but this book definitely has some unique parts to it so it’s definitely one to check out if you’re looking to start off an interesting series.
I gave The Fourth Monkey an 8/10 rating. I found the characters to be dynamic and have some interesting parts to them. I enjoyed the back story of Detective Sam Porter a lot. He’s a wounded man suffering from a lot of trauma. Having lost his wife in a tragic incident he’s been home on leave from work for some time. Being the lead Detective on the 4MK Killer for the past five years has further left him in a difficult position mentally. Not long after losing his wife, and still not clear whether to come back to work, Sam is called with the news. A major break has happened in the 4MK case and they need him there. While you may be thinking to yourself that it seems odd to call him in when he’s dealing with this, I’ll be real this is no small break, it’s major. Sam is desperate to get to work and hopes that they may finally piece together who they have been chasing all these years later. When characters like Sam go through a trauma like that in these books they go one of two ways, they turn hard and mean, or soft and trusting. I don’t say soft as an insult, it actually is truly one of the reasons that Sam’s needed on the case. The 4MK Killer does not respond well to unkindness. He’s a bit of a different killer.
The 4MK Killer is in his eyes a de-sinner by taking life, he cleanses the earth by spilling blood. He follows the classic message of see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil, and do no evil. Run by this message he enacts his cleansing by taking someone close to a person who has sinned and doing all of those four things to this person. They send the sinner the victim’s body parts to let them know they have sinned. While the whole speak no evil thing is a bit overdone, I thought Barker added an interesting twist to it that the killer doesn’t enact that on the sinner, but on someone they love. I mean it’s arguably more twisted, and may not make a ton of sense but it does a bit more as the book goes on.
Without getting too much into how and why this happens, we get to look at the written biography of sorts of the 4MK Killer. It’s wild, and I really enjoyed these parts of the book. It was a little sub-mystery in the main mystery, and I found that it didn’t take away at all from the main mystery of why the 4MK Killer took 15-year-old Emory as his latest victim but just added this other really interesting part into the book. I will say that the diary parts are a little more theatrical and unbelievable, but I wouldn’t really call this book a realistic mystery. I would say some parts are but it is a bit theatrical definitely. I tend to either like this or hate this because I gravitate more to realistic books, but this one was a hit for me. I obviously can’t speak to the rest of the series but the first book is definitely one to check out. I definitely have the second book on my list to check out and will hopefully be reading it soon.
*** Don’t go past this point if you don’t want to read any spoilers ***
Alright, so like I mentioned before, the mystery is a lot and has a lot of different parts to it.
The break that happens for Sam in the 4MK Killer case is that he’s called to the site of an accident, and the circumstances are weird. A man was seemingly accidentally hit by a bus while walking to deliver a package to the post office. The package he was delivering included human body parts, and was clearly marked with the postage of the 4MK Killer. The killer has been on a rampage for the past few years of course so this was not the first time the police saw the distinct packaging and the contents inside. The question becomes who’s ears are in the box, and did the 4MK Killer just get accidentally killed by a bus? Or did he step out in front of it on purpose? Is this even the killer?
To make the story a bit shorter it’s exposed that it was not the killer who died by the bus, and it’s Emory’s ears in the box. Emory’s father Talbot is up to some shady things and has been all his life. It comes to light that Anson Bishop the real 4MK Killer has a long-winded history with Talbot in which he directly blames him for the death of his father. Bishop having grown up with two terribly horrifying parents (which does not excuse him for the messed up shit he does) who were killers of their own blames Talbot for his family being destroyed. I mean reading the diary parts it makes sense why this man ended up being a murderer himself.
The main thing I didn’t want to mention earlier is that this is a series that follows Bishop as the 4MK Killer, his story doesn’t end in this book and he isn’t caught. There is this insinuation at the end of the book that he won’t be away from Sam’s life for long, having sent Sam the parts of the man who killed his wife.
Emory lives, which is a nice ending, but I was definitely more pulled into how Bishop was going to show up again. You would think having gotten away from Sam, he would get away, but something makes me think that he finds this all to be too much of a fun game, and doesn’t fear consequences.
The man pretending to be Bishop was the Uncle of Emory’s boyfriend who was a sort of uncompensated partner of Bishop. It seemed like the uncle did these things for Bishop to get money, but it ended up killing him so the money didn’t really mean all that much in the end.
While the mystery does have a lot of parts to it, it’s not a hard one to follow. Once the pieces start to fall into place everything makes sense. I liked how the diary and present parts play out together throughout the book kind of weaving this picture of the killer as we go.
I hope you enjoyed this review! Have you checked out The Fourth Monkey by J.D Barker before or any of the other books in the series? What did you think?
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