Title: Shakespeare's Champion
Author: Charlaine Harris
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Berkley
Copyright: 1997
ISBN: 0425213102
Pages: 206
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 20 February, 2007

Lily is a cleaning woman in the small town of Shakespeare, Arkansas. A cleaner with a traumatic past, who erects high walls around herself and works out at the gym and the dojo fervently. One morning, she opens up the gym to find a bodybuilder whose larynx has been crushed by a laden barbell. Tensions are already high over the murder of a young black man, and racist literature stars appearing everywhere, followed by a bombing at a black church. Lily falls in with a private detective who is trying to get to the bottom of the hate literature and eventually gets to the bottom of the case.

Harris writes with great insight into her spiky character, making her compelling and sympathetic. The plot moves along briskly, leading to a satisfying if unsurprising conclusion.

This is the second book in the Lily Bard mysteries. Like all the books, it stands on its own.