As I will readily admit, I am a huge fan of Charlaine
Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series. After bewailing my lack of “Deadlocked”, the
latest of the series, a coworker told me to try the Lily Bard series. This is
another of Harris’s series about a young woman who lives in the southern town
of Shakespeare. The first book in the series is “Shakespeare’s Landlord”.
Lily Bard is a mystery. She’s moved around for several years
to try and escape a past that haunts her and finally settled in Shakespeare where
she has become a cleaning woman for many local residents . Similar to Sookie,
from the Sookie Stackhouse series, she is a strong willed woman working a blue
collar job. Lilly practices martial arts and keeps herself separate from her
neighbors. But when Lilly witnesses someone dragging away a body, she decides
she can help figure out who the murderer is.
I expected the book to have a few more references to
Shakespeare or something that tied it more to the iconic bard. Instead what I
found is another kick ass southern woman, but without all of the intrigue of
Sookie. The only reasons I really kept going were to figure out who did it, and
because it was such a short read. I don’t feel a need to continue with the series.
Lilly was too off-putting, and that has a lot to do with her past, but I still
could not recognize with her, which is something that’s essential for me to get
into a book. There was not a lot of action either. The mystery itself was
bland. Perhaps I was expecting the fun supernatural elements as in the Sookie
series, but those are missing as well.
There are shelves of mysteries out there; ones with women
with an ugly history looking to start over and ones with women who kick butt. I’d
suggest you take a look into those in place of Lilly Bard.
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