Authors Kristen Ashley & Karen Rose

John Charles recently welcomed Kristen Ashley and Karen Rose to The Poisoned Pen. There are still a few signed copies available of Ashley’s Avenging Angel and Rose’s Cheater. Check the Webstore for copies of the books. https://store.poisonedpen.com/ John Charles always asks authors about their backgrounds, so the interviews are always interesting.

Here’s the description of Avenging Angel.

Rachel Armstrong has a burning need to right the world’s wrongs. Thus, she becomes the Avenging Angel.

And maybe she’s a bit too cocky about it.

While riding a hunch about the identity of a kidnapper, she runs into Julien “Cap” Jackson, who was trained by the team at Nightingale Investigations in Denver. Now he’s a full-fledged member at their newly opened Phoenix branch.

It takes Cap a beat to realize Raye’s the woman for him. It takes Raye a little longer (but just a little) to figure out how she feels about Cap.

As Raye introduces Cap to her crazy posse of found family and his new home in the Valley of the Sun, Cap struggles with his protective streak. Because Raye has no intention to stop doing what she can to save the world.

But there’s a mysterious entity out there who has discovered what Raye is up to, and they’ve become very interested.

Not to mention, women are going missing in Phoenix, and it seems like the police aren’t taking it seriously.

Raye believes someone should.

So she recruits her best friend Luna, and between making coffees, mixing cocktails, planning parties and enduring family interventions (along with reunions), the Avenging Angels unite to ride to the rescue.


Here’s Karen Rose’s Cheater.

A shocking murder leaves an affluent retirement community reeling in this riveting, high-stakes second installment of the San Diego Case Files, from New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Karen Rose.

Death is not an unfamiliar visitor to Shady Oaks Retirement Village, which provides San Diego with premier elderly support from independent retiree housing to full-time hospice care. But when a resident’s body is found brutally stabbed and his apartment ransacked, it’s clear there’s someone deadly in their community. Detective Katherine “Kit” McKittrick quickly discovers that Shady Oaks is full of skeleton-riddled closets, and most tenants prefer to keep their doors firmly closed to the SDPD.

A longtime volunteer at the retirement facility, Dr. Sam Reeves honors his late grandfather’s memory by playing the piano for the residents regularly. So it shouldn’t be such a surprise when Kit crosses paths with him during her investigation, after she’d avoided the criminal psychologist—and the emotions he evokes—for the last six months.

Sam’s rapport within the retirement village proves vital to the case, and the pair find themselves working together once again—much to Kit’s dismay. But she is determined to apprehend the shadow of death lurking around Shady Oaks…and equally determined to ignore the feelings she’s developing for a certain psychologist.


Karen Rose is the award-winning, #1 international bestselling author of more than 25 novels. She has been translated into twenty-three languages, and her books have placed on the New York Times, the Sunday Times (UK), and Germany’s der Spiegel bestseller lists.


Enjoy the conversation with Kristen Ashley and Karen Rose.