From Publishers WeeklyHarris'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. (Nov. 12)series.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.From BooklistLily Bard has married private investigator Jack Leeds, although she hasn't told many people yet. In tiny Shakespeare, Arkansas, another dreamtime episode finally brings Lily to understand she needs help, and she finds it in a local therapy group of women who have been raped. Lily's own story is horrific, and this series is as much about Lily's re-finding her own self as it is about solving crimes. The leader of the therapy group is a woman named Tamsin, who is being stalked in spectacular ways. When those ways include a grisly murder in Tamsin's own office, Lily wants to know why. She's mostly given up her cleaning service to apprentice to Jack, and she is still obsessive about her own physical training. This dark-edged series finds surcease from a great deal of bloodshed in Lily's growing awareness of the power of her and Jack's attachment, even through a miscarriage and a vicious attack by one of Jack's ex-wives. GraceAnne DeCandido Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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