Blood on the Roses

By Robert Hays

In 1955, at the height of alarm over the Emmett Till murder in Mississippi and after the Supreme Court ruling against school segregation, Associated Press reporter Rachel Feigen travels from Baltimore to Tennessee to report on a missing person case.

Guy Saillot’s last contact with his family was a postcard from the Tennessee Bend Motel, a seedy establishment situated on beautiful Cherokee Lake. But they have no record he was ever a guest.

As the investigation deepens, Feigen has problems of her own when three local extremists decide to teach a lesson to the “uppity jewgirl” from the North who’s poking around in things that are none of her concern.

But events in the Tennessee Bend Motel’s room number 10 don’t turn out exactly as they’d planned.

This frank and honest story does justice to its superb Southern setting, capturing both the engaging qualities of the Southern people, and the terrible acts of discrimination and racism carried out by a few.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Jun 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310242182

Robert Hays

Robert Hays has been a newspaper reporter, public relations writer, magazine editor, and university professor and administrator. A native of Illinois, he taught in Texas and Missouri and retired in 2008 from a long journalism teaching career at the University of Illinois. He has spent a great deal of time in South Carolina, the home state of his wife, Mary, and was a member of the South Carolina Writers Workshop. His publications include academic journal and popular periodical articles and ten books, including his collaborative work with General Oscar Koch, G-2: Intelligence for Patton. Robert and Mary live in Champaign, Illinois. They have two sons and a grandson and share (long story!) a cat named Eddie with the family next door.