Behind the story of The House on Crow Mountain by Rebecca Lee Smith

Rebecca Lee Smith has been everything from a tax collector to a stay-at-home-mom to an award-winning professional actress and director. She loves writing small-town cozy-ish mysteries that make use of her southern roots.

Channeling an inner strength

Rebecca lives in the mountains in east Tennessee. She says some of her favorite scenery is where the Appalachian and the Blue Ridge Mountains meet on the Tennessee/North Carolina border. “It’s wild and craggy and breathtaking, and I knew I wanted to set a mystery there someday. I also knew I wanted to write about a small town that is full of charm, surrounded by farmland, with a thriving artists’ community at its core. My obsession with long buried family secrets gave me the nugget I needed for the plot. Because you can bet your sweet tea and biscuits that even the most upstanding families always have a few juicy secrets tucked away.”

In some senses, those mountains are a metaphor for the type of person Rebecca admires most. She said, “I have always admired someone who can pick themselves up and get on with their life after something horrible happens, and do it with kindness and grace while hanging onto their sense of humor. In The House on Crow Mountain, Emory Austen’s soon-to-be ex-husband is murdered in their NYC apartment when he stops by to pick up his things. Before he arrived, she bailed on him, and now she is drowning in guilt, knowing that if she’d kept her promise and stayed, he would still be alive. 

“Emory handles herself with intelligence, humor, and heart while coping with a sick aunt, a past she can’t change, and newly discovered family secrets, all the while trying to piece together clues and discover what she has that a killer might want. She is who I want to be. Who we all want to be. I’m the person who thinks up the perfect snappy comeback in the shower the next morning. Emory can come up with it on the spot.”

From romantic suspense to cozy mysteries

While writing The House on Crow Mountain, Rebecca says she had some health issues. She’s since recovered, but the setbacks and procedures it took to get her healthy taught her a few lessons. “I had a lot of downtime and stops and starts while writing the book. Which, as it turned out, wasn’t a completely bad thing. The Universe kept forcing me to step back and gain a little more perspective on the scenes I’d written. I learned I could take a break, then take a deep breath, pick up where I left off, and keep going.”

Rebecca describes herself as a ‘recovering romantic suspense author’ who had an epiphany one day while reading a cozy mystery by Sara Rosett, author of the Murder on Location series. “It suddenly occurred to me that what I really enjoyed reading (and writing) was the mystery part of the book. With a little romance and suspense thrown in for good measure. But mostly, I realized it was the puzzle and the humor and the mystery that kept me coming back day after day. It was as if I had finally given myself permission to stop trying to mold myself as a writer into a genre I had outgrown and write what I really loved.”

To round out her cozy mystery, Rebecca included a dog named Daisy Mae. “She’s a sweet, huge, velvet-skinned bloodhound, who is based on an actual bloodhound I know. For research, I spent a lot of happy times getting licked and nuzzled and slobbered on (in the best possible way) by the real Daisy Mae in order to make her scenes feel as authentic as possible. Not exactly crazy, but so much fun.”

Learn more about Rebecca Lee Smith at rebeccaleesmith.com. Did you like this interview? If so, click here to read more Behind the Story interviews from your favorite authors.