Cleaning woman and karate expert Lily Bard is a woman with a complicated past. Trying her best to cope with her terrifying memories and horrible nightmares, she decides to join a weekly group therapy session in her hometown of Shakespeare, Arkansas. At first Lily can hardly believe the number of her fellow Shakespeareans who share her life experiences.

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.

From the Anthony Award-winning author of the immensely popular Sookie Stackhouse mysteries comes the first book starring Lily Bard, a reclusive cleaning lady with a penchant for karate. When Lily finds and reports a dead body, her shady past and connections to potential perpetrators make her a leading suspect.

Lily Bard is going home for the holidays. More comfortable in baggy sweats than bridesmaid's frills, Lilly isn't thrilled about attending her estranged sister's wedding. She has moved to Shakespeare, Arkansas, to start a new life, cleaning houses for a living, trying to forget the violence that once nearly destroyed her. Now she's heading back to home and hearth - just in time for murder.

Aurora "Roe" Teagarden's fortunes change when a deceased acquaintance names her as heir to a rather substantial estate, including money, jewelry, and a house complete with a skull hidden in a window seat. Roe concludes that the elderly women has purposely left her a murder to solve. So she must identify the victim and figure out which one of her new, ordinary-seeming neighbors is a murderer - without putting herself in deadly danger.