Shakespeare's Landlord by Charlaine Harris

This is the first in the series.

Lily Bard lives in the little town of Shakespeare, Arkansas. She makes a living cleaning houses for local residents. She spends most of her free time working out. One night she is out walking late at night because she has trouble sleeping. She sees somebody taken the cart she uses to take trash to the curb and put something on it. Then she sees them wheel this into the garden area across the street.

After she sees this person put her cart away and go into the apartments next door, she investigates what they dumped. It ends up being the dead body of the apartment complex owner. Lily makes an anonymous call to the chief of police. She has a past she doesn't want people to know about, so she doesn't want to get involve with this. However, as it turns out, the chief and others do hear about her past and she ends up doing some slight sleuthing to find the murder. She doesn't want the blame on her.

Overall, I enjoyed the story. It didn't start out strong for me. In part I believe this is because she refers to what happened in her past several times, but doesn't tell us what happened. Once we do find out, the story picked up for me. I ended up liking Lily and some of the other characters too. I plan on reading more of the series - at some point. haha!

mystery/214pgs