The Devil Hath a Pleasing Shape
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
2025 Sir Walter Raleigh Fiction Award nominee for the North Carolina Book Awards
Walk the dark halls and threatening streets of 1920s Asheville in this thrilling third installment of The Stephen Robbins Chronicles, as fan-favorite Robbins confronts the dangerous contrast between appearance and reality at the exclusive Grove Park Inn.It’s the autumn of 1924, and Benjamin Loftis has a problem. A college girl is discovered—naked and dead—in one of the finest rooms of his beloved Grove Park Inn. To protect the reputation of this jewel in the crown of North Carolina and all the Southern mountains, Loftis calls in Stephen Robbins, a local man famous in some circles for finding missing people and solving unsolvable crimes.Robbins, now scarred and battered by life’s wars, would rather retreat from the world than dive headfirst into a new mystery. But he agrees to help and is quickly swept into the social hierarchy of Asheville’s complex and harshly stratified society, running head-on into the financial and political elite who control this mountain town—those who want a murderer caught but not necessarily the murderer.With so many socialites focused on reputation over truth, will Robbins be able to find the devil walking among them and bring them to justice? Find out in The Devil Hath a Pleasing Shape, a thrilling noir set against the backdrop of the jazz age in America.Want more Stephen Robbins? Read more of his story in A Short Time to Stay Here and My Mistress’ Eyes are Raven Black.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Roberts's superb third whodunit featuring Stephen Robbins (after My Mistress' Eyes are Raven Black) finds the PI investigating the mysterious death of a college girl at the hotel where he used to work. In 1924, Robbins, 44, has retired from detective work and is living as a recluse after his wife died in childbirth. He's drawn out of his shell when Benjamin Loftis, current owner of the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, N.C.—a swanky hotel that Robbins once managed—asks Robbins to help solve a murder: 20-something college student Rosalind Caldwell was found, naked and shot twice, in an expensive Grove Park room where she wasn't staying. With the sheriff's inquiry stalled two weeks after the killing, Loftis fears continued damage to his business if things aren't resolved quickly. Robbins agrees to help, but finds that, once he starts poking around, Asheville's elites are working very hard to throw him off their scent. Roberts matches evocative historical detail and genuinely surprising twists with top-shelf character work, cementing Robbins's spot in the troubled PI hall of fame. Fans of Ray Celestin's City Blues Quartet will adore this.
