Family Lies Review & Blog Tour!

Author: Karen Rose

Series: San Diego #4; RS#33

Berkley Publishing

March 31, 2026

Special thanks to Berkley Publishing for a complimentary arc of this title for review and for the blog tour invitation. Opinions expressed are my own.

Review:

Family Lies by Author Karen Rose is the fourth book in the San Diego Case Files series and number 33 in the Romance Suspense series overall. Each book in the series is complex and intense with a tautly woven plot line and ongoing character development. As always, readers are hooked from the beginning by an intriguing prologue and held captive until the final big reveal.

Family Lies features San Diego Homicide Detective Kit McKittrick and Police Psychologist Sam Reeves along with other series' regulars. After spending time in the foster system, Kit is finally learning to trust - both her devoted adoptive parents, the McKittricks, and her love interest, Sam, whose patience with her is beginning to pay off. Kit is fiercely independent, loyal, and driven and extremely protective of her adoptive siblings. When Akiko, an adoptive sister, receives a call from someone claiming to have knowledge of her birth mother, Kit and Sam are by her side. When they arrive at the woman's house, shots are fired hitting Kit, and they find the woman they hoped to talk to dead inside her home. What have they walked into? How does it pertain to Akiko? As they begin investigating, the plot thickens, getting more convoluted as bodies begin to pile up. Kit won't stop until she uncovers the truth, and Sam won't leave her side.

Author Karen Rose never fails to deliver an action packed, complex story with multiple threads that eventually intertwine in an explosive climax. The romance between Kit and Sam is a slow developing one with Sam easing Kit into it in hopes of a permanent relationship. Sam is aware of Kit's trust issues stemming from her past but continues to demonstrate his willingness to wait for her. Rose flawlessly weaves the past and present together as family secrets and lies surface with deadly consequences. While this book can easily be read as a standalone, the overall story arc continues to develop with characters introduced in previous books. For this reason, I recommend readers enjoy the first three books in this series prior to reading Family Lies. Highly recommended to fans of police procedurals and romance suspense.

Synopsis:

As an infant, Kit McKittrick’s foster sister Akiko was abandoned at a firehouse. Now 32, Akiko has received an unsettling phone call from a woman who says that she knew her birth mother but refuses to divulge any details except in person. Akiko is nervous but also thrilled at the prospect of finally learning about her blood relations.

Kit has a bad feeling about this and insists on accompanying Akiko to meet the woman. Sure enough, as they stand on Mary Sherman’s doorstep, shots are fired and Kit is hit...and inside the house is a corpse: Mary Sherman herself.

Although she’s on medical leave and forbidden to work the case, Kit cannot rest. With police psychologist Sam Reeves, she undertakes a covert investigation into the mysterious Mary Sherman. Was she Akiko’s birth mother? Why did she reach out after all these years? And who had a motive to kill her?

As more bodies pile up, Kit starts to put together the pieces of the frightening puzzle that is Akiko’s birth family, and she’ll come to wonder whether some secrets should stay buried after all.

Meet the author:

Internationally bestselling, RITA-award winning, author Karen Rose was born and raised in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. She met her husband, Martin, on a blind date when they were seventeen and after they both graduated from the University of Maryland, (Karen with a degree in Chemical Engineering) they moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. Karen worked as an engineer for a large consumer goods company, earning two patents, but as Karen says, “scenes were roiling in my head and I couldn't concentrate on my job so I started writing them down. I started out writing for fun, and soon found I was hooked.”

Her debut suspense novel, DON'T TELL, was released in July, 2003. Since then, she has published fifteen more novels and two novellas. Her seventeenth novel, ALONE IN THE DARK, will be released in 2016.

Karen's books have appeared on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, USA Today, London's Sunday Times, and Germany's der Spiegel (#1), and the Irish Times, as well as lists in South Africa (#1) and Australia!

Her novels, I'M WATCHING YOU and SILENT SCREAM, received the Romance Writers of America's RITA award for Best Romantic Suspense for 2005 and 2011. Five of her other books have been RITA finalists. To date, her books have been translated into twenty-four languages.

A former high school teacher of chemistry and physics, Karen lives in Florida with her husband of more than twenty years, her two daughters, two dogs, and a cat.