The Mountain Mystic follows a detective investigating the disappearance of an old family friend who gains information from a psychic on where the body is hidden. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

A lot of this series is inspired by stories my family has told me about what it was like growing up in a coal town. This particular book was inspired by two of those stories. One involves my Aunt Rita, who had a prescient dream as a child about a neighbor being murdered. The other involved my Aunt Connie, who visited a psychic in her youth that accurately predicted she would be a young widow. Those stories had been bouncing around inside my head forever. Then one day, I was reading an article about a cold case investigation where the police were so desperate for clues they engaged the services of a psychic and everything came together after that.

What are some things that you find interesting about the human condition that you think makes for great fiction?

Past is not only prologue, it’s often the B plot of a good story. Our personal histories determine much of the psychology that unconsciously drives us. So I like stories where, to resolve the surface-level A-plot, the character needs to work out some aspect of their psyche, a toxic trait or mental block, that allows them to achieve the results they’ve been seeking. It’s like the external and internal plots are two disparate lines on a graph that finally converge at the climax of the story.

How did the mystery develop for this story? Did you plan it before writing or did it develop organically?

I consider myself a hybrid plotter/pantser. Before I begin writing a book, I usually know how the story will begin and end, as well as what the major plot twist will be in the middle. Everything else I make up as I go along. Writing it that way gives me the feeling of discovering the story, rather than dictating it. Also, it allows me to come up with tons of ideas throughout the process that I never would have thought of if I’d committed to a detailed plot outline from the outset.

Can you tell us more about what’s in store for Marybeth Cain and the direction of the next book?

There will be one more book in this series to wrap up the lingering tensions in Mary Beth’s life, as the larger unsolved mysteries in her past. One thing that makes Mary Beth different from most police protagonists is that she was raised by criminals and thinks like they do. That can be an asset when solving crimes, but it also means she really toes the line between enforcing the law versus her own vigilante sense of justice. That recklessness has caused her a lot of problems that so far she’s been able to sidestep, but in the third book, she’ll need to fully come to terms with it. Also, after driving her family’s criminal operation out of West Virginia, she finds that she may have created a bigger problem than she solved. At the same time, her old nemesis, attorney Alexander Pomfried, takes advantage of his new position as district attorney to come after her. For that reason, the third book is written more in the style of a legal thriller than a police procedural.

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