Hit and miss affair - Rated 
Jonathan Barnes' debut is a plot heavy fantastical piece of victoriana.
It starts inventively with a murder worthy of Poe and some wonderfully grim one liners but soon begins to rely on walk on parts by ever more bizarre characters and a plot that weighs itself down like a deflated souffle. There are touches of brilliance and many of the characters are genuinely amusing but ultimately this is quite lightweight so don't go expecting a sensational pastiche like say Michael Cox's Meaning of Night as though Barnes tries for literary, the plot's machinations tend towards something overtly pulpish like Mark Frost's The List of 7.
Ultimately the novel is fun and witty and clever with endearing characters (our narrator particularly and the wonderfully bizarre and gruesome image of the rampaging Chairman) but is very much a light but enjoyable read that isn't going to shake the world of literature.
A little more thriller and a little less soft pornography would have served this book well - Rated 
I bought this book when it was first released back in the summer of 2007 and have only just got around to reading it, only to give up on it 300 pages in. I felt it was a bit too long at over 600 pages and while I dont let the size of a book put me off, there simply wasnt enought excitement to keep the pages turning and I feel much of it was un neccesary and did not add to the story.
Another fault I found was that there were too many characters being added all around the same time and it was hard to remember them all and which of them would be important in the story line... which turned out to be not alot of them.
However my biggest quarrel with this book is the amount of romance in it. I dont mind romance in my thriller/crime novels if i feel its necessary to the plot, which I thought was not the case in this book. It was far too obvious that the lead characters would be attracted to eachother and awfully cliche but nonetheless Karen Rose went ahead with it anyway. Which is slightly annoying as this book isn't portrayed as a romantic book and seems to be aimed more at the thriller genre. However I can tell you that this isn't the case.
I wont be buying any more of Karen Rose's books, although she is a good writer and clearly has a talent, I find the added romance a bit too much and not to my liking as there werent enough thrills in this book to keep me interested as opposed to the likes of Tess Gerritsen and Alex Kava for example.
disappointed - Rated
As a first-time reader of K. Rose I didn't know what to expect but found this book hard-going - the pace being rather slow, i.e. not much happens in a lot of pages, contributes to the feeling of the book being too long. Wasn't too keen on the romance (skipped those bits) but the plot, when things finally happen, was basically good. In comparison to other crime/thrillers I felt the whole thing needed 'tightening up'. Anyway, I also bought another K. Rose novel at the same time as Count to Ten, so, never to be daunted by a 'bad' one, I will persevere in the hope she gets better!
An Innovative Crime - Rated 
A troubled soul plans and executes the elimination of people who have destroyed elements of his past in a chronological and innovative manner though somewhat horrific.
The characters surrounding this journey are depicted in tune with the tone of the writing and add great flavour to it's read. Their spice contributes to the mixture of a romantic interlude ( slightly more productive than Louisa and Martin from Port Wenn), family relationships, troubling events at a school for delinquent kids, a terrorism of journalists fighting for their crust of a scoop and an investigation team routing for the motive, manner and method of the killer in an unpredictable, just, manner. Each character has a troubled personal life many of them routed deeply in their past creating a parallel with the killer though different solutions are encountered to overcome them.
This tale was an enjoyable read though like a soap opera jumps from scene to scene sometimes leaving you with out the vision of who was the subject until the 2nd or 3rd paragraph. The strength of one scene did not outweigh another but it did leave a slight confusion of what was the main focus of the story, though the blend of them fitted warmly together.
With a title of the novel of "Count to Ten" this phrase generally means, stop think and count to ten before you speak so you do not says things wrongly, but as the killer says this to one of his victims, it's Count to Ten before your world is switched off.
For me I had empathy for the killer due to his trouble past but opposed his actions even though his moral fibre put the pet out of the house before his destruction making you believe his actions were honourable. I wanted to read the struggle of him meeting his quest before the investigators unearthed his identity without the interruptions from the subplots but at the same juncture wanted his actions foiled before they began.
A good but not an overwhelming read. I will reach for another Karen Rose novel.
A real-page turner - Rated
*There's a serial killer/arsonist at work in the Chicago area. A female cop and a male fire investigator are teamed up to investigate. The cat and mouse hunt that follows soon gets very messy indeed.
This book is a real page-turner, in spite of the fact that there are 660 of them to turn. As murder follows murder and fire follows fire the reader sees things from the point of view of the protagonists, seeing what goes right and what goes wrong for each of them.
It's a good mystery too, even though the killer is revealed about half-way through. That revelation doesn't clear up all the puzzles surrounding him and his victims. Nor does it answer all the questions about the earlier lives of the investigators, questions which don't make their working relationship any easier, nor smooth the path of their growing personal attraction.
As well as being a first-rate thriller this is also a book about the connections, good and bad, between children and adults, and about the strengths and weaknesses of families. It's a book with a man and a woman who each have their own demons to conquer, tracking down a coldly ruthless killer, one whose main weapon comes in the blisteringly hot form of aggravated, bomb-like fires. Once started this is a book that's not easy to put down.
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