From Publishers Weekly
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. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
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.]Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
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. Stuart Miller


From Kirkus Reviews
But its neither Shakespeare nor Christmas, actually, since Lily Bard, the most formidable cleaning woman in Shakespeare, Ark., leaves her adopted hometown in the opening chapter to return to her family's queasy bosom in Bartley for her sister Varena's wedding, a Christmas Eve affair that's bound to upstage the usual round of holiday festivities. What it doesn't upstage is a long-unsolved kidnapingthe snatching of newborn Summer Dawn Macklesby from her family's porch eight years before, a crime that springs to alarming life again courtesy of an anonymously donated newspaper clipping announcing that Summer Dawn is one of the three eight-year-olds pictured. The candidates: Varena's next-door neighbor Eve Osborn, her minister's daughter Krista O'Shea, and Anna Kingery, daughter of Varena's intended. Lily, whos herself the survivor of a brutal abduction and would rather be working than socializing anyway, isn't about to back down from this challenge, particularly after she and Varena stumble on the bodies of Dr. Dave LeMay and his nurse Binnie Armstronga powerful reminder that the Macklesby kidnaping has yet to be laid to rest. The detection is routine (Lily snoops around as she cleans the suspects' houses), and bucolic Bartley is no Shakespeare. Only Lily herself, in full attack mode, carries the day. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Fresher, more unusual, than any other mystery I've read lately."
--The Washington Post Book World

"This one works on every level. The writing and plotting are first-rate."
--The Washington Times

"A seamless story...In her Lily Bard novels, Charlaine Harris blends a noirish atmosphere with a traditional mystery."
--Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel


Review
"Fresher, more unusual, than any other mystery I've read lately."
--The Washington Post Book World

"This one works on every level. The writing and plotting are first-rate."
--The Washington Times

"A seamless story...In her Lily Bard novels, Charlaine Harris blends a noirish atmosphere with a traditional mystery."
--Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

FROM THE PUBLISHER

What makes Charlaine Harris's Lily Bard novels stand out among traditional cozy mysteries is the decidedly noirish spin she puts on the seemingly typical charming southern town of Shakespeare, Arkansas, and on her heroine. Lily Bard, a karate devotee by choice and a cleaning woman by trade, is a woman with a dark past; she's fiercely protective of her independence and reserved about herself. In short, Lily makes a refreshing, compelling amateur sleuth. In Shakespeare's Christmas, Lily's third appearance, she heads home to Bartley, Arkansas - always an uncomfortable scenario for the introverted Lily - for her sister Varena's Christmas wedding. But Lily's got more to worry about than being a bridesmaid for a sister to whom she's no longer close. Soon after she arrives in Bartley, Lily's private-detective boyfriend shows up too, and not just for moral support: He's investigating a four-year-old unsolved kidnapping. Try as she might, Lily can't help but get involved when she discovers that the case hits dangerously close to home - for Varena's new husband is the widowed father of a girl bearing a remarkable resemblance to the vanished child.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

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. (Nov.)

Library Journal

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.]

Kirkus Reviews

But it's neither Shakespeare nor Christmas, actually, since Lily Bard, the most formidable cleaning woman in Shakespeare, Ark., leaves her adopted hometown in the opening chapter to return to her family's queasy bosom in Bartley for her sister Varena's wedding, a Christmas Eve affair that's bound to upstage the usual round of holiday festivities. What it doesn't upstage is a long-unsolved kidnaping—-the snatching of newborn Summer Dawn Macklesby from her family's porch eight years before, a crime that springs to alarming life again courtesy of an anonymously donated newspaper clipping announcing that Summer Dawn is one of the three eight-year-olds pictured. The candidates: Varena's next-door neighbor Eve Osborn, her minister's daughter Krista O'Shea, and Anna Kingery, daughter of Varena's intended. Lily, who's herself the survivor of a brutal abduction and would rather be working than socializing anyway, isn't about to back down from this challenge, particularly after she and Varena stumble on the bodies of Dr. Dave LeMay and his nurse Binnie Armstrong—-a powerful reminder that the Macklesby kidnaping has yet to be laid to rest. The detection is routine (Lily snoops around as she cleans the suspects' houses), and bucolic Bartley is no Shakespeare. Only Lily herself, in full attack mode, carries the day. .