The House on Crow Mountain by Rebecca Lee Smith

The House on Crow Mountain by Rebecca Lee Smith
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Genre: Contemporary, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller, Romance
Rating: 5 stars
Reviewed by Snowdrop

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.

Such an enjoyable book. The kind you can’t put down. The kind that is so good you’re mad when it’s time to do any chore whatsoever. This wasn’t your everyday romantic suspense. It was full of suspense and yet only hinted at romance. My favorite kind of romance story. It also wasn’t the “trick the little old auntie out of her property” book. There were many pieces to the story, and this is what kept me glued to the pages.

This is an author who can make her characters real. I could picture everyone. A sweet helpful old woman in a nursing home, a bratty eighteen-year-old female, another totally grown up but still very bratty female, a widow, and of course a handsome man. A handsome man who seems good and trustworthy, yet a great deal of people in town hate fiercely. There were many other characters that added to this story and yet there was never a moment I had to turn back a page or two to see just exactly who someone was.

There is so much going on in this book. So many underlying subplots. But just like the author’s characters, the subplots seem to add to the story rather than confuse it. It is difficult to write a plot so intricate and yet keep it as clear as this story is.

I intend to see what else Rebecca Lee Smith has written, but I also hope she is currently writing more good stories like this one.