Shakespeare's Landlord by Charlaine Harris
(Book 1 of the Lily Bard Mystery series)
Lily Bard lives in Shakespeare, Arkansas. Lily cleans other people's homes. Lily has a secret history. And the landlord of the apartment building next door has turned up dead. Who? Why? How?
The characters in the Lily Bard universe aren't quite as charming or endearing as those in Harris' Aurora Teagarden mysteries but they're definitely still quirky. I expect that's because Harris herself is an interesting character. Lily, the main character herself, is less endearing than I expected but that can be attributed to a backstory that we learn around halfway through this first novel in the series.
I expect that the character will grow on me as I move through the series - the Aurora series took some time as well, and started out with the advantage of having had movies before I started reading. The same with Sookie Stackhouse - I watched the first season of the show before I had read the books. Only the Midnight series came without a visual medium as I'd never seen the series (and still haven't.)
I enjoy the idea that someone with the last name Bard came to live in a place called Shakespeare, and appreciated the quick explanation in the story of how that happened. It's nice that this isn't the original hometown of the main character, so it gives the story a different feeling than either the Stackhouse or Teagarden series.
I expect I'll speed through this series fairly quickly, as it's an easy read tumbling through the mystery as the main character does, not knowing exactly what's happening but often drawing the same conclusions in a similar timeline. I wonder who'll die next?
(#23-2022)
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