Shakespeare's Champion (Lily Bard Mystery, Book 2) by Charlaine Harris

Shakespeare's Champion by Charlaine Harris


No steel magnolia, Lily Bard is one blunt, tough Southern woman--a tiny, karate-chopping, bodybuilding dynamo who's come to Shakespeare, Arkansas, to restart her life after a series of traumatic events just hinted at in this second novel in Charlaine Harris's series (after Shakespeare's Landlord). When she slips into her gym for an early morning workout and finds Del Packard with a barbell across his throat, she doesn't think for more than a second that it's an accident. Not when it's the third death in a couple of months in a town hardly big enough for its own WalMart. Then the blue broadsheets with thinly veiled hints of white supremacist activity start turning up under the windshield wipers of every car on Main Street. Lily's a relative newcomer to Shakespeare, but as a cleaning woman for the local landed gentry, she's privy to many secrets that most outsiders never learn. When a handsome stranger keeps turning up at the scene of an increasingly bizarre series of events, including a burglary at one of her regular clients and a bombing in a black church, she suspects he may be more than an innocent bystander. Which is too bad, because he stirs up desires that Lily hasn't felt for any man for a very long time. Lily Bard is a complex woman who embodies many of the contradictions of the modern South--its dark side as well as its charm--and this suspenseful, deftly written novel will send new fans scrambling to read its predecessor. --Jane Adams

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
The beginning of this book was very disjointed and hard to get into for me. Maybe if I had read it immediately after reading the first book it would have been better. It kept referring to things that had happened in the first book. But about 1/3 of the way through it started to come together and it got good! I really like Lily, but some of her logic makes no sense to me. I am glad that she seems to have finally decided on a man that she wants to be with and I am looking forward to reading more in this series.


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