COUNT TO TEN

Author: Karen Rose ISBN: 0446616907 2/2007 SUSPENSE Publisher: WARNER VISION

1, 2 I'M COMING FOR YOU. In all his years in the Chicago Fire Department, Lieutenant Reed Solliday has never experienced anything like this recent outbreak of house fires—devastating, vicious, and, in one case, homicidal. He has another problem—his new partner, Detective Mia Mitchell. She's brash, bossy, and taking the case in a direction he never imagined. 9, 10 START RUNNING AGAIN. Mia's instincts tell her the arsonist is making this personal. And as the infernos become more deadly, one look at the victims' tortured faces convinces her and Reed that they must work closer to catch the killer. With each new blaze, the villain ups the ante, setting firetraps for the people Reed and Mia love. The truth is almost too hot to handle: This monster's desire for death and destruction is unquenchable…and for Mia he's started the countdown to an early grave. COUNT TO TEN

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

I confess, I enjoyed reading COUNT TO TEN and found myself thinking about it even when I had to put it down, but I know it is too much. Too many torture/murder scenes, too many characters, too many outlandish ties to those characters, and it takes too long for the cops to deal with the bad guy! Now that my minor complaining is out of the way, let's discuss why even though it's too much, I still really am moved by it.

I get to visit my favorite Chicago cops again—good (scary) memories there. The love story and the subsequent hero and heroine's own stories are heartbreaking and beautiful. The bad guy is a GREAT bad guy. I feel sorry for him although he's horrible. What he does is awful, but why he does it can be understandable. Then again, it's still wrong, so that makes this book a real emotional one for me.

So, I guess what I am saying is, though this one is graphic, brutal, and chockfull of things that perhaps don't need to be, it's still good enough to be in your TBR pile!

Shannon Johnson