J. D. Barker

J. D. Barker was told at twenty-two that he is autistic, and he treats the diagnosis as a strength that sharpens his plotting rather than an obstacle. Born Jonathan Dylan Barker in Lombard, Illinois in 1971, he finished school in Florida, took a business degree at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, and self-published Forsaken in 2014; it reached the shortlist for a Bram Stoker Award. The Fifth to Die (2018) is the middle book of his 4MK trilogy, in which the Chicago detective Sam Porter pursues a serial killer called the Four Monkey Killer, with The Fourth Monkey before it and The Sixth Wicked Child after. The Coast-to-Coast Murders (2020) is one of his collaborations with James Patterson, tracking an adopted brother and sister across the country as two investigators close in. With Dacre Stoker, a great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker, he wrote Dracul in 2018, a prequel built from Bram Stoker's surviving notes.