March Feature: Kill for Me by Karen Rose [ Edited ]

[becke_davis]

Our March Feature, Kill for Me by Karen Rose, is not for the faint of heart.  I discovered Karen's books not long after she was first published in about 2003.  When I'm in the mood for dark suspense, she's one of my go-to authors!

Karen's books connect, but it's complicated.  That said, Kill for Me is the third book in a three-book series, starting with Die for Me and Scream for Me.

To see a chart of the book relationships, check out the diagram on her website: http://www.karenrosebooks.com/related.htm 

These are her books, in publication order (Kill for Me just came out in February, but Karen has another book, I Can See You, coming out in hardcover in August):

Don't Tell  

Have You Seen Her?  

I'm Watching You  

Nothing to Fear  

You Can't Hide  

Count to Ten  

Die for Me  

Scream for Me  

Kill for Me  

Message Edited by becke_davis on 02-27-2009 06:20 PM

Message Edited by becke_davis on 02-27-2009 06:35 PM

[becke_davis]

Here's an introduction to Kill for Me from Karen's website: 

http://www.karenrosebooks.com/

KILL FOR ME, the finale to the Vartanian family trilogyis now available!  KILL FOR ME is the story of Special Agent LukePapadopoulos and Assistant ADA Susannah Vartanian and picks up where SCREAM FORME left off.

Five teenage girls have been murdered. Asixth girl survived, and only she can reveal the secrets of a ring that kidnapsand sells teenage girls on the black market. But those responsible for thecrimes will do whatever it takes to maintain the girl's silence.

Susannah and Luke have sworn to stop the murderers for their own reasons.Susannah, the sister of the hero in SCREAM FOR ME, suffers from a mysteriouspast that is connected to the sinister black market. Luke is an investigativeagent and a computer expert who refuses to let another child predator getaway. 

The case willlead them to the realm of Internet chat rooms, where anyone can mask theiridentity. As Susannah and Luke draw closer to the criminals, they discover achain of deception so intricate they don't know who to trust.

Here are some reviews:

http://www.thrillerwriters.org/2009/01/kill-for-me-by-karen-rose.html

http://thebookbinge.com/2009/01/book-watch-kill-for-me-by-karen-rose.html 

http://www.bookloons.com/cgi-bin/Columns.asp?name=Karen%20Rose&type=Interview 

http://darquereviews.blogspot.com/2009/01/review-kill-for-me-by-karen-rose.html

http://www.goodreads.com/videos/show/2131.Karen_Rose_Die_For_Me

http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2008/05/14/review-scream-for-me-by-karen-rose/

http://www.thrillerwriters.org/2008/04/scream-for-me-by-karen-rose.html

http://www.goodreads.com/videos/show/2130.Karen_Rose_Scream_For_Me 

http://www.imthemedia.com/profiles/blogs/1272926:BlogPost:4130

Message Edited by becke_davis on 02-27-2009 06:34 PM

Message Edited by becke_davis on 02-27-2009 06:39 PM

Message Edited by becke_davis on 02-27-2009 06:59 PM

[becke_davis]

WELCOME TO KAREN ROSE, NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLING AUTHOR! 

A note to our board participants:  I've advised Karen and Kate that I'm not going to have regular access to a computer this week.  I'll check in as often as I can, but I'm going to be traveling and my desktop can't come along for the ride.  I'm going to go ahead and post these introductions a little early.  I hope you will all stop by on Monday to give these charming ladies a rousing welcome!

I'm excited to have Karen Rose join us this month!  I've been a fan of her books for several years, and I was excited to get to meet Karen in person when she did a book signing at a Barnes and Noble in the Cincinnati area a few weeks ago.  Karen and I have a few things in common:  she used to live in Cincinnati, OH, where I currently live.  We both are married to men named Martin.  She currently lives in Florida, where I semi-live because I spend so much time visiting my daughter there!   She used to work for a company that I buy a lot of products from (anyone in Cincinnati will be able to figure that one out quickly).  (And, hey, didn't Donna MacMeans used to work for that nameless company, too?)

When I met you, I have to say, you seemed pretty normal for a woman who writes such dark, scary books.  Don't Tell was the first one I read and there were times I had to set it down because it was so intense.  I know your website has some of this information, but please tell us how you came to write books that, I can only imagine, must be very hard to write.  Doesn't all that darkness suck you in?  Are you ever tempted to write a light, romantic comedy, for instance?

Did you know, right from the start, that you wanted to write mysteries, or did you start out writing in other genres?  With all the clamor for paranormals, have you been tempted to jump on that bandwagon?  I could imagine you writing those, too. 

I'm curious about your series characters.  Do you plot out these connected books right from the start?  Or are you a pantser?   I find that hard to imagine, with these books, but I've heard stranger things -- we had one author who writes her books longhand.  Do you have any quirks when it comes to your writing: only write at certain times of day, have to go through a "good luck" routine when starting a book, anything like that?

Okay, I think I should stop know, because my questions are starting to get a little weird.  This should be enough to get you started, and I'm sure others will have questions for you on Monday, too.  I'll be back on the computer as soon as I can -- probably Monday evening.  Karen, I'm thrilled that you are taking the time to visit with us -- thank you! 

Message Edited by becke_davis on 02-27-2009 06:53 PM

[becke_davis]

I'm not sure exactly how many times Karen Rose's books have made the New York Times best seller list, but I think it's a lot.  Still, you know you've made it when your name becomes synonymous with a particular genre.

I was just reading a romance called Addicted to Love by Lori Wilde.  I had to laugh when I came across this line on page 275:  "She'd planned on spending the last Saturday in October curled up in bed reading the latest Karen Rose thriller."

Love it!! 

[lucypearl]

Hi, I'm Lucy Pearl, and I am so excited to meet Karen Rose and all her fans.  I just finished Kill for Me.  I can't wait to read another one!  I've read 3 books, and not in the order I see listed on this website.  My friend turned me on to these books, and I am turning other friends on, too. 

Looking foward to meeting you all!

[becke_davis]

I read some of them out of order and it didn't bother me.  But then I do that a lot!

[lucypearl]

Reading Karen's books out of order didn't bother me either.  lol  I may read book #1 now.  lol  I love the covers too ... intriguing! 

[Karen-Rose]

Hey everyone!  I'm happy to be here this month - many thanks to Becke for the warm welcome.

[Karen-Rose]

Becke, I'm going to start with the easiest questions, first - how I came to start writing.

I so enjoyed meeting you in Cincinnati, too!  As you said, I lived there for 15 years while I worked for a big consumer products company.  I was a product development engineer and have 2 patents for making Metamucil taste better.  I also worked material development, which is basically finding the best plastics, papers, etc to make the products and packages.  For this I traveled the USA, far and wide.  My last big project area there involved computer systems, and for this I traveled the world.  It actually was more interesting than it sounds, LOL.

Anyway I started writing while working as an engineer.  It really started when I began to read again.  I'd stopped reading for fun in college - no time with working a job, homework, and sometimes sleeping.  It wasn't until I started the USA travel that I began reading again for pleasure - and that was because I had to fly (on planes, you see) and I was terrified!

I will insert here, that I have taught physics at the high school level and studied it pretty thoroughly in college.  I still don't get the magic of air travel.  Something that large has no business staying in the air.  So I began reading books to take my mind off the fact that, as one of my colleagues told me cheerfully, "There are no fender-benders at 30,000 feet."  Thank you, so much...

So as I began to read, it loosened up the creative corner of my mind and a scene broke free.  It was new and I knew I'd never read it before.  It played like a movie, again and again.  Frankly, it was annoying as it kept me from concentrating on my work.  One day, on vacation, I decided if I wrote it down, it would go away.

That one scene became my first book.  I wrote it in airports, hotel rooms, anywhere I had a quiet moment.  I couldn't wait to get back to the story and see what those characters did next.  Nobody was ever supposed to read it - and nobody will ever read that story, LOL.  It ended up over 1000 pages long.  

Over time, I figured out that 1000 pages was a big too long for a book.  At my husband's encouragement (read: nagging), I joined an authors' group and learned a few things about writing and the publishing business, and finally found the courage to submit my work (which was better by this time!).

I wrote for fun for five years.  Once I got serious, I focused on submitting my work and within about two years, had made my first sale, DON'T TELL.

It was almost ten years to the day between my writing that first scene and seeing my first book on the shelf.

So that's my "how I got started" story!

Message Edited by Karen-Rose on 03-01-2009 01:38 PM

[Karen-Rose]

Did I start out writing mysteries?

No, I didn't.  I started out writing what thought of as "slice of life" stories, with a healthy bit of romance.

At the time my husband was working as a mental health therapist, counseling both perpetrators as a condition of their parole/probation, and their victims.  We didn't discuss his work, that wouldn't have been proper.  But we did discuss motiviation, in depth.  I often wondered why some victims become abusers themselves, while others do not, instead becoming advocates, social workers, even prosecutors.  We talked about nature vs. nurture and how personal choice and personality factor in.

The darkness of his job seeped into my writing, I suppose.  The first story I seriously submitted was women's fiction, but with a very suspenseful opening.  That became the prologue of DON'T TELL, my first book.   Someone whose opinion was quite weighty said, "You have a suspenseful voice.  Have you ever considered suspense?"

I said, "No, but why not?"  I'd read a lot of suspense, but never written it.  I tried, and found my niche.

Now, when other, non-suspense, writers and I get together, they'll talk about their plots and I'll say, "And then they stumble over a body, right?"

They say, "NO, that's in your book, Karen.  Mine is a comedy.  No dead bodies."

So now I see bodies everywhere.  My husband says he sleeps with one eye open, but it isn't true.  He couldn't snore so loudly if he did.  (Don't tell him I said that, LOL.)

[Karen-Rose]

Have I considered paranormal?

Well, every now and again it pops in my mind, but never past a "wouldn't it be cool" kind of thought.  I do love my Buffy and Sci-Fi DVD's and there's something about creating your own world, you know?  

Right now, I'm really enjoying writing mystery-thrillers!  In the future, who knows?

[Karen-Rose]

Doesn't all that darkness suck you in?  Are you ever tempted to write a light, romantic comedy, for instance?

Does the darkness suck me in?  No, but it does take a toll.  There are times I just don't want to write a villain's point of view, so I skip that scene and come back to it later, maybe write a lot of scenes in the villain's POV at once.

It takes a different kind of focus for me to drop into that place in my mind where the villain sits.  There was one villain that scared even me.  Sue Conway, NOTHING TO FEAR, was completely soulless.  It was like I imagined her behind a door at the end of a long corridor and when I went to write her scenes, I'd hesitate.  Some days I'd turn around and walk out of the corridor, leaving her door firmly closed.  She was a tough one.  There was a part of me that wanted to soften her, possibly because she was a woman.  But there was nothing soft in her, no soul.  And that was terrifying.

Could I write light comedy?  I wish!  Trouble is, I'm not funny. Sometimes I'll have a funny character, but I'm not a funny person.  My husband is hilarious.  He has this dry, witty edge to his humor that cracks me up.  But alas, it has not rubbed off on me in our 26 years together.  So no comedy in my future.  Comedians everywhere are totally safe.

Unless one of my villains chooses to ... no wait, that's another question, LOL!

[Karen-Rose]

I'm curious about your series characters.  Do you plot out these connected
books right from the start? 

My books are connected, but I consider only books 7, 8, and 9 to be a "series."  That's DIE FOR ME, SCREAM FOR ME, and KILL FOR ME.  In the rest of my books, the characters are connected, as Becke says.

She's got the link to the "related" page on my website.  Being a good engineer, I made a chart with arrows and everything!  But no math is required, I promise.  The characters are friends, family members, part of communities.  A group of books will focus on a law enforcement group of a particular city.  So far, I've set books in Chicago,  Raleigh, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.  Characters pop up in each other's books, you see.

If you read them out of order, you won't be confused.  The worst that could happen is you read a book and know a character doesn't die, because they pop up in a later book.  Now DIE FOR ME, SCREAM FOR ME, and KILL FOR ME are stand-alones, but you get a much better sense of the history and details of the ongoing mystery if you read them in order.

FYI, my August '09 book, I CAN SEE YOU, introduces a new group in Minneapolis while bringing back characters from my earlier books.  More on this in a different post.

No, I didn't intend to write connected characters when I first started.  Heck, I never dreamed I'd have written 10 books when I first started!  But it felt right to bring them back and readers seemed to like it too.  So now, I do plan ahead.  I've always got a list of "next book" characters in my mind.

So many characters, so little time!

[Karen-Rose]

Or are you a pantser?   I find that hard to imagine, with these books, but I've heard stranger things -- we had one author who writes her books longhand.  Do you have any quirks when it comes to your writing: only write at certain times of day, have to go through a "good luck" routine when starting a book, anything like that?

A pantser?  Heavens no.  I totally admire the pantsers.  I'd have a complete meltdown if I didn't know who did it in the end.  In the beginning I had flowcharts and spreadsheets that were color coded by POV and scene.  (It's hard to break old engineering habits!)  Now, I know how it starts, who did it, basically how they'll get caught, and perhaps some major events in between.

I have more fun with it now, and find myself surprised a lot more often!  In KILL FOR ME, that happened a lot, because I hadn't intended to write a trilogy and wasn't sure how it would end.  That caused me some intense moments, I have to say.  There were times I'd type a paragraph, then sit back and say, "Wow, that explains a whole lot!"

But I am far, far from a pantser.  Besides, then what would I do with the mountains of sticky note pads I keep for plotting emergencies?  If I suddenly became a pantser, it would cause the Post-It note people a lot of fiscal distress.

LONGHAND?  No, we won't even go there.  Tenth grade typing class, best time investment I ever made, even though it was my first and only C in highschool.  I started out slow, but luckily figured it out.

Quirky routines?  No, not really.  I don't write at a certain time.  When the story hits, I head to my "cave" of an office, close the door and write for days at a time.  I usually come out for dinner and when I get stuck.  But when I'm on a roll, my husband brings me food.  He's a helpful, supportive soul.

I don't have candles, special lighting, or any weird mojo.  I do have a Mojo-Jojo doll (from the Power Puff Girls), given to me by my daughter, years ago.  I also have a collection of ugly statues and figurines that I like to keep on my desk.  I do like chocolate when I'm writing the steamier love scenes, LOL.  Other than that, no boas, nothing special.

[Karen-Rose]

Hey, LucyPearl!

I'm excited to meet you too!  Thank you - I'm so glad you've enjoyed my books.  And thanks for telling your friends.  The word-of-mouth recommendations are priceless.

[vivico1]

Hi Karen,

I have to tell ya, I didn't use to read much fiction. As a matter of fact even when I started in the Barnes and Nobles clubs, I stayed with the non fiction things they used to have back then. Then I made a few friends in here, good friends, and we started reading some clubs together, majority rules kind of thing lol. Now I had never read any of what I would call  romance thrillers, but last year, I ran across a sale on a book of yours You Can't Hide, read the synopsis and thought, ok, I can try something new too and bought 4 of them, one for me and one for my three friends in here and we all read it together and had our own little side room to talk about it. We LOVED it! So you got us hooked! Then I bought a couple more and sent two to one of my friends and she and her daughter loved them. So thennnn, we saw you had a new book coming out, and I told my 3 friends in here about it, so we all have Kill For Me and I love stand alone books, so it doesnt matter if I read out of order. I got hooked on Harlen Coben and I just read em as I buy them! 

I have to tell ya, you are intense, whether its the dark stuff, and they are quite gritty and scary, but I like that, to the romantic side of the story. When I first read You Can't Hide, I asked my friends, so is this what you guys call a romance thriller? MAN what I have been missing LOL! Let's see if I can use this word in here ok? Cause its a good word, applies to many things and definitely here. You write great foreplay, whether it is building up the tension between a man and a woman over a long period of time in the story, or the foreplay of building up the scary things and characters to climatic endings! I told my friends, this is definitely a woman's writing, cause the guys don't write the relationship things like you do hehe. These are stories tho,that the villians are so well written and good grief what they are in this book so far, (I am not through yet and hope I don't run into any spoilers about it or any from the others of yours I havent read yet), would keep a man or woman on the edge of their seats! You definitely have 4 new fans of whom I am one, and the others are coming too when we heard you were going to be here. All from buying 4 copies of a book, in a genre I have never had much interest in before, that was on sale. I know we will be buying more of your books and loving being scared to death or dying waiting for that kiss or something to happen! There is one part of this book that does hit really close to home, but rather than upsetting me, because this involves so many more characters, I just want to keep reading!

Thanks for coming in to join us! Just loving the book! 

[KimCastillo]

Hey  Karen!

You know I'll read your grocery list if you write it down. LOL

My question is: how does someone so nice and sweet write such twisted villians?!?!

[becke_davis]

---

Karen-Rose wrote:

Becke, I'm going to start with the easiest questions, first - how I came to start writing.

I so enjoyed meeting you in Cincinnati, too!  As you said, I lived there for 15 years while I worked for a big consumer products company.  I was a product development engineer and have 2 patents for making Metamucil taste better.  I also worked material development, which is basically finding the best plastics, papers, etc to make the products and packages.  For this I traveled the USA, far and wide.  My last big project area there involved computer systems, and for this I traveled the world.  It actually was more interesting than it sounds, LOL.

Anyway I started writing while working as an engineer.  It really started when I began to read again.  I'd stopped reading for fun in college - no time with working a job, homework, and sometimes sleeping.  It wasn't until I started the USA travel that I began reading again for pleasure - and that was because I had to fly (on planes, you see) and I was terrified!

I will insert here, that I have taught physics at the high school level and studied it pretty thoroughly in college.  I still don't get the magic of air travel.  Something that large has no business staying in the air.  So I began reading books to take my mind off the fact that, as one of my colleagues told me cheerfully, "There are no fender-benders at 30,000 feet."  Thank you, so much...

So as I began to read, it loosened up the creative corner of my mind and a scene broke free.  It was new and I knew I'd never read it before.  It played like a movie, again and again.  Frankly, it was annoying as it kept me from concentrating on my work.  One day, on vacation, I decided if I wrote it down, it would go away.

That one scene became my first book.  I wrote it in airports, hotel rooms, anywhere I had a quiet moment.  I couldn't wait to get back to the story and see what those characters did next.  Nobody was ever supposed to read it - and nobody will ever read that story, LOL.  It ended up over 1000 pages long.  

Over time, I figured out that 1000 pages was a big too long for a book.  At my husband's encouragement (read: nagging), I joined an authors' group and learned a few things about writing and the publishing business, and finally found the courage to submit my work (which was better by this time!).

I wrote for fun for five years.  Once I got serious, I focused on submitting my work and within about two years, had made my first sale, DON'T TELL.

It was almost ten years to the day between my writing that first scene and seeing my first book on the shelf.

So that's my "how I got started" story!

Message Edited by Karen-Rose on 03-01-2009 01:38 PM

---

Metamucil, eh?  I'll never look at a bottle of that again without thinking of you!  (I'm sure that thought thrills you!)

I know two other writers (unpublished) who started as engineers.  Maybe I'm missing something here...although, I guess it does make sense for someone with an organized mind (as I assume engineers need) would be good at plotting mysteries.

Where did your world travels take you?  My brother-in-law used to travel all over for IBM.  I use to envy him until he explained how little time he had to see more than airports and hotels.  Were you able to do any real sight-seeing?

I had to laugh at your fender bender comment.  My son loves to travel but, after a couple of scary experiences in Lhasa, now he's terrified to fly.  Still does it, it just terrifies him.  I'll pass on your comments -- maybe he should try plotting a book, too!

[becke_davis]

---

Karen-Rose wrote:

Did I start out writing mysteries?

No, I didn't.  I started out writing what thought of as "slice of life" stories, with a healthy bit of romance.

At the time my husband was working as a mental health therapist, counseling both perpetrators as a condition of their parole/probation, and their victims.  We didn't discuss his work, that wouldn't have been proper.  But we did discuss motiviation, in depth.  I often wondered why some victims become abusers themselves, while others do not, instead becoming advocates, social workers, even prosecutors.  We talked about nature vs. nurture and how personal choice and personality factor in.

The darkness of his job seeped into my writing, I suppose.  The first story I seriously submitted was women's fiction, but with a very suspenseful opening.  That became the prologue of DON'T TELL, my first book.   Someone whose opinion was quite weighty said, "You have a suspenseful voice.  Have you ever considered suspense?"

I said, "No, but why not?"  I'd read a lot of suspense, but never written it.  I tried, and found my niche.

Now, when other, non-suspense, writers and I get together, they'll talk about their plots and I'll say, "And then they stumble over a body, right?"

They say, "NO, that's in your book, Karen.  Mine is a comedy.  No dead bodies."

So now I see bodies everywhere.  My husband says he sleeps with one eye open, but it isn't true.  He couldn't snore so loudly if he did.  (Don't tell him I said that, LOL.)

---

Yes, that is DEFINITELY your book, Karen!  And after learning about your husband's work, I'm not surprised that your stories took this direction.  Very scary!

[Karen-Rose]

Hey Vivian - you made me smile!  (Okay, I grinned.)

Thank you, first of all, for taking a chance on a new author.  That huge, and I really appreciate it!

Yes, there were some very steamy scenes in YOU CAN'T HIDE.  I laughed when I read, "MAN what was I missing!"  It reminded me of the first time I read a romantic thriller.

I'd been reading romances and loved them.  Still do.  There is something about a Happily Ever After ending that is so very satisfying.  So, one day, I pick up a book by an author I'd never read before.  It had sisters, each sister had a hero and a romance, and there was a serial killer.  I thought, "How cool is this?"  It was Montana Sky by Nora Roberts (one of my favorite authors) and I wondered if she'd written any more.  Ha :-)  That was Nora's 100th book, so I had a lot of reading to catch up on!

I thought the same thing - wow, what have I been missing!

I'm so glad you enjoy the ... ahem, buildup to the romance and the suspense!  I do, too.

Say hey to your 3 friends!