Terry Roberts, Author
Terry Roberts has written another book in his mystery series that features Stephens Robbins solving crimes in some recognizable Western North Carolina locales as Roberts imagines they might have been in the 1920s. In The Devil Hath a Pleasing Shape, we find Robbins investigating the murder of a young girl staying at the Grove Park Inn. Although the books in this series are “carefully researched and reasonable portrayals of the time and place,” Roberts says, the events are fictionalized.
“The Grove Park Inn of 1924 is a very different place from the Grove Park familiar to us 100 years later,” he says. “It was obviously less modern and quite rustic. It is a haunted and haunting place, much more so than today, and as such, it’s the perfect setting for a classic noir mystery.”
Robbins’ character was introduced in A Short Time to Stay Here, where he is the manager of the Mountain Park Hotel and then the Inspector General of the WWI German Internment Camp in Hot Springs. “As the dramatic events of his life unfold, he eventually earns a reputation as someone who is masterful at locating the missing—both persons as well as things,” says Roberts.
“I would recommend reading the books in [The Stephen Robbins] Chronicles in order if possible,” he says, “but if any one of the three makes its way into your hands, fix yourself a strong drink, light a lamp on a dark night and begin. Each of the three stands alone.”
The Devil Hath a Pleasing Shape, October 1, 2024, mystery, hardcover $30.99, paperback $16.99, by Terry Roberts, and published by Turner Publishing, Nashville, TN. Learn more at TerryRobertsAuthor.com.
