Karen Rose is a master at her craft and I’d happily put any of her 26 mainline Romantic Suspense series against any other mystery/suspense book out there. Her story telling is masterful and her characters are extremely well fleshed out. As an added bonus for the audiobook format, Hilary Huber (from the Cincinnati series) is back with her excellent interpretation of Rose’s subtext.

Cold Blooded Liar has Rose’s trademark flavor, but the pacing is slightly different. Her other novels fully explore the two primary characters over the course of their 500-600 pages. Cold Blooded Liar only scratches the surface, and combined with the altered naming convention, sets the expectation of future books in the sub series where their story continues to be at center stage. Because Rose is my favorite author and has stuck to the same excellent pacing (with each book exploring a new pair of primary characters, but strong continuity of the story line among different groups in different cities), the departure caught me a bit off guard. However, as I have often wanted to see many of her characters more, I look forward to seeing how the story of Sam and Kit develops over future books.