Karen Rose has proven herself an author to be reckoned with as she rises to the level of Tami Hoag, Lisa Gardner, and Kay Hooper with her new book, Count to Ten, in which she has delivered yet another winning romantic mystery thriller. Count to Ten combines the extreme panic manufactured by an efficiently ruthless killer on the rampage with the devastation caused by deliberately lit fires. Mounting fear that the killer is working to a pre-determined timeframe adds drama as it appears that he may reach his ultimate goal before the good guys can get a handle on him.  

In this current offering Rose teams up recurring heroine, Detective Mia Mitchell, last seen in You Can’t Hide with Chicago Fire Department, Lieutenant Reed Solliday to solve a series of arsons that turn out to cover multiple homicides. Lieutenant Reed Solliday is a widower still in mourning over his wife’s sudden death, who finds himself struggling to juggle the recent outbreak of devastatingly vicious arsons with caring for his daughter, Beth. Matters become even more complex when he is assigned brass and bossy, Detective Mia Mitchell, who is still reeling from her father’s death, as his new partner, but despite their initial reactions to one another, they soon find themselves in the midst of a strong emotional involvement. Their relationship is tested, however, when Mia finds herself the next target for the flame-happy madman as he works his way toward his goal to destroy the people who let his brother die and put his rage to rest.  

Interestingly, when the identity of the killer is revealed midway through the book, the pressure increases rather than decreases and the knowledge of the killer’s troubled past highlights that the man they are chasing is indeed an incredibly disturbed person. Using the villain’s massive grudge, Rose introduces some fascinating social issues surrounding the nurture/nature theory, using not only the villain but also Mia and Reed as examples. The question that Rose poses is whether abused children can rise above their past or will, their upbringings doom them to a life filled with struggling to overcome it. For example, Mia and her sister grew up with a violent, abusive father but Mia escaped by going to college, whereas, her younger sister was left at home which resulted in the sister getting involved with a bad crowd. Mia’s excuse for her sister is she was unable to escape the environment in which she was raised raising the argument that nurture plays an important role in how people choose to live the rest of their lives. Reed, on the other hand, grew up in foster homes and was fortunate enough to find a family that chose to believe in him resulting in his belief that nature controls a person’s outcome and that the good will always be good and the bad will be bad.  

Since her debut in 2003, Karen Rose has consistently soared to the top of the bestseller list and in Count to Ten; she offers a complex psychological thriller that covers a lot of ground, throws up plenty of graphically violent scenes and squeezes in a growing romance. Essentially, there is something for everyone here with a definite impression that this will not be the last we will see of Reed Solliday and Mia Mitchell. One thing that Rose did especially well was juggle a large cast of characters, some of whom were from other books while introducing a secondary cast of individuals  complete with their own quirks, goals, actions, and reasons for being in the book. This tightly crafted whodunit is suspense at its finest and only a master, like Rose, could write a chapter filled with a gritty murder scene filled with blood and gore, only to introduce, in the next chapter, a believable love scene! Overall, Count to Ten is a fast read, and a great escape with vivid scenes and a romance that sizzles!

[tags]Count to Ten, Karen Rose, fiction, mystery, romance, romantic thriller, arson, murder, comples psychological thriller, nurture vs nature, You Can’t Hide[/tags]