Shakespeare's Christmas

September 28, 1998
Harris, author of the Aurora Teagarden cozies, adds a touch of grit to her books featuring briskly efficient, 31-year-old Arkansas cleaning lady Lily Bard. Lily hides a traumatic past under a prickly exterior, but, in the series' third book (after Shakespeare's Champion, 1997), this karate expert lowers her defenses just long enough to reconcile with her family and help solve a series of grisly murders. Returning to her home town of Bartley (a stone's throw from her residence in Shakespeare, Ark.) for her sister Varena's wedding, Lily is plunged headlong into an eight-year-old kidnapping investigation after her lover and confidant, Jack Leeds, a PI with a questionable past, arrives to follow up an anonymous tip that the kidnapper and the missing girl are both in Bartley. When the town's beloved family practitioner, his nurse and a young mother are bludgeoned to death, suspicion falls on Varena's fiance--a widower who just happens to have an eight-year-old daughter. The investigation intensifies, and Lily uses her family connections and her impeccable cleaning skills to ferret out some crucial information. Harris tells a forceful story with a complex, flawed heroine who is wary of emotional attachments. The denizens of Bartley--the shrewd sheriff; old high-school classmates with long memories; Lily's loving but overprotective parents--form a memorable gallery of secondary characters. Harris's blend of cozy style with more hard-boiled elements isn't always smooth, but it's interesting to see her working toward a deeper complexity.

November 1, 1998
Returning home for her sister's Christmas wedding, Lily Bard--cleaning woman, karate expert, and amateur sleuth--finds more than just mistletoe: two murders and a four-year-old unsolved kidnapping. [See review on p. 128.--Ed.]

Starred review from September 15, 1998
At the first appearance of the maid Lily Bard in "Shakespeare's Landlord", we predicted crime fiction's first cleaning-lady series. It's nice to be on the money (at least once in a while), for here is Lily in her third adventure. And she's in rare form, too, as she steels herself to visit her family on the occasion of her sister Varena's wedding. Lily, physically and psychologically scarred by a horrifying sexual assault years before, still finds it hard to attend social events as she struggles with her wariness and distrust of all people. But she is overwhelmingly happy when her PI friend Jack Leeds shows up for the prenuptial festivities. Jack is on a case--an unsolved kidnapping of a small baby some years back, a baby that might very well be the eight-year-old daughter of Varena's fiance . Lily does the only thing she can--help Jack resolve the case before the wedding. Lily Bard is one of the best-drawn and most compelling characters in contemporary mystery fiction--complex, smart, streetwise, tough. Add tight plotting and a smooth style, and it's no surprise that Harris has reached a new high. Don't miss it. ((Reviewed September 15, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)