Shakespeare's Counselor
A Lily Bard Mystery
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4.3 • 102 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Cleaning woman and karate expert Lily Bard is a woman with a complicated past. Trying her best to cope with her terrifying memories and horrible nightmares, she decides to join a weekly group therapy session in her hometown of Shakespeare, Arkansas. At first, Lily can hardly believe the number of her fellow Shakespeareans that share her life experiences.
As it turns out, the group members' feelings aren't the only things that need sorting out -- they assemble for a session and find a woman dead, killed in bone-chilling fashion and deliberately left on display to send a twisted message. Who would commit such horrendous crime, and who is the intended recipient of the message?
Before long, Lily becomes embroiled in this disturbing murder and its aftermath, one in which the brutal killer's motives are entirely unclear. The truth is, the situation has dredged up more than a few of her own terrible secrets, and she may not be able to rest until she can untangle the who and why of this terrible crime. But can she accomplish this before the killer strikes again, and before her nightmares send her over the edge? Shakespeare's Counselor is the most complex and absorbing installment yet in Charlaine Harris's engaging, original, and more than slightly dark mystery series.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. FYI:Harris is also the author of the Aurora Teagarden mystery series.
