The House on Crow Mountain

 

                          The House on Crow Mountain

by Rebecca Lee Smith

 

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GENRE: Mystery

 

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BLURB:

 

When her aunt suffers a stroke, New York portrait artist Emory Austen returns home to the North Carolina mountains to mend fences and deal with the guilt over her husband’s senseless death. But that won’t be as easy as she hoped.

 

Someone in the quirky little town doesn’t like Emory. Is it the sexy architect who needs the Austen land to redeem himself? The untrustworthy matriarch? The grudge-bearing local bad boy? Or the teenage bombshell who has raised snooping to an art form? Even the local evangelist has something to hide. Who wrote the cryptic note warning her to “Give it back or you’ll be dead?” And what is ‘it’? As the clues pile up and secrets are exposed, Emory must discover what her family has that someone would kill for.

 

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EXCERPT:

 

Could it be something of Kent's they were after? Something he’d kept hidden? He was good at keeping secrets. In fact, he’d been a master at it. After his death, I’d packed the few possessions he hadn’t moved out of the apartment and sent them to his parents. I’d kept nothing except the gold wedding band he’d thrown at me from across the room and his cell phone.

 

Kent’s death.

 

Hard to even think those words, much less say them out loud. It was all still so surreal. 

 

Maybe everything that had happened in Bitter Ridge was karma. Maybe the Universe was finally giving me exactly what I deserved. Kent's death had been my fault. And no matter how much he had deceived me, or betrayed me, or reduced my sad little trusting heart to shrapnel, I could never forgive myself.

 

I laid my head on my knees and closed my eyes. I rocked my body back and forth, like a child trying to soothe itself when sleep will not come. Then at last, in the cool dark shadows of the night, I began to cry. 

 

Oh, God, I was so sorry. 

 

I hadn’t loved Kent for a long time. At the end of our marriage, I hadn't even liked him. But I had never wished him dead.

A Word With the Author

Did you always want to be an author?

I did always want to be an author. Growing up, I was an avid reader (thanks to my mom, who never went to bed without a book), but I didn’t try to write anything until I was home with a five-year-old and a baby on the way. It seemed like a cheap and easy way to keep myself sane. I had worked in theater for years acting and directing, which gave me a pretty good ear for dialogue and timing, so I had that going for me. I’ve never been interested in being a playwright, though. My first two books were romantic suspense, but I have always loved cozy mysteries, both British and American. It occurred to me one day, while I was reading a cozy, that that’s where my heart lay, and that’s what I should be writing. 

 

 

Tell us about the publication of your first book.

My first book, A Dance to Die For, is a romantic mystery/suspense about an ex-Broadway dancer who comes to the mountains of North Carolina to discover the truth about her best friend’s death. It was the third manuscript I had written, and I was beginning to think my dream of traditionally publishing a novel would never come true. Over the years, I’d had so many close calls, all ending in rejection, but I’d never given up. It seemed like a miracle when The Wild Rose Press wanted to publish my book. By then, I was almost sixty years old, and it was mind-blowing. 

 

 

Besides yourself, who is your favorite author in the genre you write in?

Ann Cleeves. She writes cozies and the Shetland and Vera Stanhope crime series. I also love Sherry Harris and Sara Rosett, who writes the wonderful Murder on Location series and many more.

 

What's the best part of being an author? The worst?

The best part is the surprised look on someone’s face when they ask what I do, and I say, “I write books.” I’m never sure if they believe me or not. The worst part, besides keeping my butt in the chair writing, is promoting myself. I’ve never been very good at that sort of thing on my own. But I’m getting better at it. (I hope.)

 

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a small-town cozy mystery about an elementary school art teacher who visits the town matriarch (the richest, most despised person in town), finds her dead, then discovers the woman has bequeathed her fortune to her out of spite. The relatives are not amused.

 

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

 

Rebecca lives with her husband and a dog named Wilbur in the beautiful, misty mountains of East Tennessee, where the people are charming, soulful, and just a little bit crazy. She's been everything from a tax collector to a stay-at-home-mom to an award winning professional actor and director. She loves to travel the world (pre-pandemic) because it makes coming home so sweet. Her Southern roots and the affectionate appreciation she has for the rural towns she lives near inspire the settings and characters she writes about. 

 

www.rebeccaleesmith.com

Twitter: @rbeccaleesmith

Facebook: Rebecca Lee Smith

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3zOrNsb  

Barnes and Noble: https://bit.ly/39JTJTl 

Kobo: https://bit.ly/3unX18j

 

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION

 

Rebecca Lee Smith will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

 

 

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway