Sharyn McCrumb, who has won several major literary awards for her southern crime fiction, likens her bestselling books to Appalachian quilts. "I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life, and local tragedy, and I piece them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the culture of the mountain South," McCrumb said in an interview in Armchair Detective. Her signature style traces the connection between the culture of the British Isles and the Appalachian Mountains of east Tennessee, incorporating elements from such distinct genres as historical fiction, mystery, and fantasy.

A voracious reader even as a child, McCrumb was seven when she knew that she wanted to be a writer. Reading a book a day nurtured an early love for storytelling, a trait that ran in her family. McCrumb's great-grandfathers were circuit preachers in North...