Review by Booklist Review
Lily Bard has married private investigator Jack Leeds, although she hasn't told many people yet. In tiny Shakespeare, Arkansas, another dreamtime episode finally brings Lily to understand she needs help, and she finds it in a local therapy group of women who have been raped. Lily's own story is horrific, and this series is as much about Lily's re-finding her own self as it is about solving crimes. The leader of the therapy group is a woman named Tamsin, who is being stalked in spectacular ways. When those ways include a grisly murder in Tamsin's own office, Lily wants to know why. She's mostly given up her cleaning service to apprentice to Jack, and she is still obsessive about her own physical training. This dark-edged series finds surcease from a great deal of bloodshed in Lily's growing awareness of the power of her and Jack's attachment, even through a miscarriage and a vicious attack by one of Jack's ex-wives. GraceAnne A. DeCandido
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Harris's fifth Lily Bard mystery set in the small Arkansas town of Shakespeare (Shakespeare's Trollop, etc.) is good enough in part to make one wish it was better as a whole. Its mainstream novelistic promise is left unfulfilled in its adherence to genre conventions. The victim of horrendous violence and plagued by nightmares, anger and self-loathing, Lily joins a local support group headed by Tamsin Lynd, a professional counselor. Tamsin herself has a major problem. She and her husband moved from Cleveland to Shakespeare after being terrorized by a stalker who remains at large. To their horror, the stalker appears to have followed them. First they find a squirrel hung from a tree in their backyard, then the corpse of one of the group in Tamsin's office. Lily, now a professional detective working for her friend/mentor/lover, Jack Leeds, wants to help. It seems two other people connected to the original investigation have followed Tamsin to Shakespeare: one is a woman cop obsessed with catching the stalker, the other a crime writer hoping to find the stuff of a bestseller. In the end, the author delivers a solution too bizarre to be credible. The book's most serious problem, however, is its lack of focus. It would like to be a story about women's pain the trauma of rape and the terror of being stalked but in fulfilling its obligations to the detective story it loses purpose and direction, as well as most of its suspense. (Nov. 12) FYI: Harris is also the author of the Aurora Teagarden mystery series. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Series heroine Lily Bard, of Shakespeare, AR, still deals with her years-ago rape by attending weekly group therapy. At one particular meeting, however, the group discovers a murder victim. Solid, clever, and quick. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Welcome once more to Shakespeare, the second most famous fictional town in Arkansas-home to Lily Bard, housecleaner to some of the best families in Shakespeare. Newly and secretly married to p.i. Jack Leeds (Shakespeare's Trollop, 2000, etc.), Lily is still trying to exorcise the memory of a brutal gang rape she suffered years before in Memphis. She's joined a small therapy group headed by Tamsin Lynd, wife of computer specialist Cliff Eggers, and for years the prey of a stalker who seems to have followed her from Cleveland to leave such trophies as the dead squirrel hung over her front door and the naked body of Saralynn Kleinhoff left on the floor of her office at the therapy center. That death is followed by the fatal stabbing of local police patrolman Gerry McClanahan, the Eggers neighbor who turns out to have been well-known pseudonymous crime writer Gibson Banks. A call from Tamsin asking Lily for her domestic services brings the cleaner to the Eggers house in time to witness the last act of this utterly improbable scenario. The least convincing of the Shakespeare series, saved from total disaster only by Lily's still-intriguing persona.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
