These Boots Are Made for Butt-Kickin'

Lloyd’s (Home Is Where Your Boots Are, 2015) second book in the MisAdventures of Miss Lilly series finds small-town lawyer Lilly Atkins kicking herself after shooting her ex-boyfriend in the foot.

With Cash Stetson in rehab, Lilly might also need therapy to get through a divorce case that brings back unhappy memories of both her cowardly ex-boyfriend and her cheating ex-fiance. Veronica Kellner’s husband is leaving her, and she needs Lilly’s help to secure her children’s inheritance after he’s gone. Soon, Lilly is bruised and bloodied in a series of mishaps—some accidental, some self-inflicted—while she investigates the couple’s secrets. As the danger escalates, Lilly finds that “the best place to find grace is with the people that know all the bad stuff you’ve done.” Lilly is as brazen as ever, and her gaggle of loudmouthed friends ride shotgun as she gossips, trespasses, and steals to get the information she needs while local law officials look the other way. Some clues are laugh-out-loud funny—like the telltale nightie that implicates a woman’s fiance in a crime worse than cheating—and dead bodies are thrown like pies in the face of justice. Lawyer and “former Yankee FBI agent” Spencer Locke, whose uncle Charlie represents Mr. Kellner in the divorce settlement, is powerless to keep Lilly out of trouble when the right side of the law is whatever side she’s standing on at any given moment. Lilly says Spencer is “as bad as Gladys Cobb’s perfume”: “Nauseously permeating and infinitely irritating”—or at least irritating enough to hint at romance without overwhelming the plot. In the previous book, Lilly’s cases piled up on her desk while she cataloged her long history with her hometown friends; in this sequel, each of her new cases feeds into the next until the evidence shows how they are all connected. It’s a formula in which every ingredient has been perfectly measured, and it works. Still, readers who are new to the series could start with this book and quickly catch up.

With sparkling wit, Southern charm, and a steady pace, Miss Lilly has hit her stride.