The Devil Hath a Pleasing Shape - Hardcover

by Terry Roberts (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Terry Roberts is the author of five celebrated novels: A Short Time to Stay Here (winner of the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Fiction and the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction); That Bright Land (winner of the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award, the James Still Award for Writing About the Appalachian South and the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction); The Holy Ghost Speakeasy and Revival (Finalist for the 2019 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction); My Mistress' Eyes are Raven Black (Finalist for the 2022 Best Paperback Original Novel by the International Thriller Writers Organization); and most recently, The Sky Club, released in July of 2022.

Roberts is a lifelong teacher and educational reformer as well as an award-winning novelist. He is a native of the mountains of Western North Carolina--born and bred. His ancestors include six generations of mountain farmers, as well as the bootleggers and preachers who appear in his novels. He was raised close by his grandmother, Belva Anderson Roberts, who was born in 1888 and passed to him the magic of the past along with the grit and humor of mountain story telling.

Roberts is the Director of the National Paideia Center and lives in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife, Lynn.