(When Lily stumbles upon the well-built corpse of a local body builder-his neck broken by a barbell-the town's underlying racial tension begins to boil over. The white victim was somehow connected to two unsolved murders of black residents of Shakespeare-and a dogged policeman is determined to stop the killing. But it is Lily herself who may have to decide whether to stay and fight for justice, or run away one more time.

No steel magnolia, Lily Bart is one blunt, tough Southern woman--a tiny, karate-chopping, bodybuilding dynamo who's come to Shakespeare, Arkansas, to restart her life after a series of traumatic events just hinted at in this second novel in Charlaine Harris's series (after Shakespeare's Landlord). When she slips into her gym for an early morning workout and finds Del Packard with a barbell across his throat, she doesn't think for more than a second that it's an accident. Not when it's the third death in a couple of months in a town hardly big enough for its own WalMart. Then the blue broadsheets with thinly veiled hints of white supremacist activity start turning up under the windshield wipers of every car on Main Street. Lily's a relative newcomer to Shakespeare, but as a cleaning woman for the local landed gentry, she's privy to many secrets that most outsiders never learn. When a handsome stranger keeps turning up at the scene of an increasingly bizarre series of events, including a burglary at one of her regular clients and a bombing in a black church, she suspects he may be more than an innocent bystander. Which is too bad, because he stirs up desires that Lily hasn't felt for any man for a very long time. Lily Bard is a complex woman who embodies many of the contradictions of the modern South--its dark side as well as its charm--and this suspenseful, deftly written novel will send new fans scrambling to read its predecessor. --Jane Adams

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