Shakespeare’s Champion (Lily Bard #2)
Charlaine Harris
Publisher: Gollancz
Lily Bard has started over in the quiet town of Shakespeare, Arkansas, as a cleaning lady. One who works out her anger and the pain of her past in a martial arts class. For Lily, the gym is a place to get away from her troubles, not find more of them. But when she stumbles on the corpse of a local bodybuilder, his neck broken with a barbell, the town's underlying racial tensions begin to boil over. The white victim was connected to two unsolved murders of black residents in Shakespeare, and a dogged policeman is determined to stop the killing. Lily may have to decide whether to stay and fight for justice, or run away one more time.
For
some reason I was convinced this was a cosy mystery series – and I really
couldn’t be more wrong! There is violence of the extremes in Lily’s world with
this book alone including death by beating, bombings, and racist extremists.
Not that any of this is done badly, but it helps if you approach these books as
a small town mystery/thriller rather than a cosy story. With this in mind it is
an extremely competent mystery which starts for us with a death in Lily’s gym
and ends in a big shoot out.
The
writing is easy to relax into even if some of the events are not easy to read
about. The town is boiling on the brink of social unrest between the black and
white communities. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a city girl, or British but
I find that kind of unrest in a small town difficult to understand in this day
and age - I would hope that type of tension is less frequent these days (the
book was originally written in 1997)!
Lily
is still the same self contained survivor we met in Shakespeare’s Landlord but she seems to be forging friendships with
other better even if opening up entirely isn’t easy for her. Her relationship
with the local doctor, Carrie gives her some nice female friendship as otherwise
Lily is surrounded by guys. A new love interest is introduced who has as much
history and baggage as Lily so it will be interesting to see how this is balanced
in the long term. Lily still isn’t the warmest of heroines and she likes to
keep herself to herself, even in her own book, but she is constantly surprising
and she is growing on me.
The
murder mystery was intriguing and I have to confess I didn’t guess what was
going on until near the end. This was a very good book that breaks expectations
(or mine at least!) and entertained me throughout – and what more can you ask
from a book?
Recommended
for fans of Nora Roberts and Dean Koontz. 8 out of 10
