The Devil Hath a Pleasing Shape

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. Agent: Margaret Sutherland Brown, Folio Literary. (Oct.)