I’m happy to welcome author Rebecca Lee Smith. Today, Rebecca shares fascinating facts about crows and her new release, The House on Crow Mountain.

Ten Fascinating Facts About Crows

1. A group of three or more crows is called a Murder.

2. Crows can recognize human faces. (Researchers had to disguise themselves by wearing rubber face masks to keep the crows from considering them their enemies.)

3. Crows have the same brain-to-body ratio as a chimpanzee, which makes them one of the smartest birds in the world.

4. American crows use scraps of food as bait to catch fish.

5. Crows have funerals. Not only to mourn, but to find out what killed their fellow crow, then they band together and chase the predator.

6. They make and use tools (usually some kind of twig) to dig insects out of sidewalk cracks for food.

7. Crows build decoy nests if they think another predator bird is watching them.

8. They enjoy playing games while flying. (Tag, maybe?)

9. American crows like to party. They will stand on anthills and rub the ants into their feathers, which causes them to get drunk from the formic acid.

10. Crows can live up to fourteen years. (And I bet they have fun doing it.)

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.

Excerpt

Never drive faster than your guardian angel can fly.

“Fat chance of that.” I glanced up from the tiny sticker someone had stuck to the dashboard of my rental car and focused on the narrow winding road. I’d kept the little Ford Fiesta ten miles under the speed limit all the way in from the airport, and the drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains had still been one mini-adrenaline rush after another.

I pulled into a foggy scenic overlook, bemoaning the fact there was zero cell service, and grabbed the map I’d picked up at the North Carolina Welcome Center. I reached for the bag of candy I used to keep myself calm and selected a dark chocolate square, perilously warm from sitting too near the heating vent. With two miles and six switchbacks to go, I risked the inevitable mess it would cause and tore the foil open with my teeth.

One single drop of dark raspberry chocolate dripped onto the center of the map. One tiny dark red dot. Just like the one that had been sitting in the middle of Kent’s forehead when the coroner rolled him over on his back.

I shoved the memory out of my head—something I had gotten decidedly better at in the last two months—and tossed the map on the seat.

It had been a long day.

And it was about to get longer.

Buy Links

Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Kobo

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.

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Giveaway

Rebecca Lee Smith will be awarding a $25 Amazon/Barnes & Noble gift card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour. Find out more here.

Follow Rebecca on the rest of her Goddess Fish tour here.