What do you find the most challenging about writing a successful series?

Well, initially it wasn't meant to be a series.

I just, I wanted to write a serial killer book, but I didn't want to write the same serial killer story that we've heard over and over again.

You know, somebody, you know, a body is found, the police investigate, another body is found, you know, they hit number three, they realize we've got a serial killer, you know, and things just kind of escalate.

Like I didn't want to tell that same story because we've seen it too many times.

So at the beginning of my book, it's called The Fourth Monkey.

We've got a serial killer who's already been operating in Chicago for five years.

So did you actually go there or is it just a place you knew about?

you.

My wife and I went to the Carolinas to meet him at a cabin that he had about two or three months later.

He disappeared for like 10 minutes and came back with like this box and set it on the kitchen table.

And it was everything that Bram Stoker had on his desk when he wrote the original Dracula.

which was fascinating to look at because like paper was difficult to find back then.

So he would write notes on like laundry receipts, like any scrap of paper he could find.

He was a theater manager and he wrote a big portion of Dracula in a day timer, which makes perfect sense when you think about it.

Oh, yeah.

Uh, can you tell us a little bit about it?

Yeah.

Yeah, so I...

My 4MK trilogy's been out for, believe it or not, it's almost a decade now.

I think Fourth Monkey came out in, in the, uh, uh, 2017.

Um, and it's, it's one of those series, you know, like, we haven't put any marketing dollars behind it, nothing like that for years.

Uh, it was traditionally published, you know, so they get their little sales blip at the beginning, and then things tend to go off to the back catalog and die.

Are we, are we missing something as an artistic community where a lot of, like, really unique works are, are just sort of, of going unseen?