The inspiration for author Kelly Mustian’s book The Girls in the Stilt House is a familiar road to many Mississippians: the Natchez Trace.

Mustian, who now lives in North Carolina, grew up in Natchez until the age of 19. The landscape of the Mississippi River’s cypress trees and the violence of Jim Crow and Prohibition provide the backdrop to her first book.

The Southern setting has served her well. “The Girls in the Stilt House” is a USA Today bestseller, and earlier this month it was announced as one of three finalists for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, an annual award for the best Southern debut novel.

“The Girls in the Stilt House” draws many comparisons to Delia Owens’ megahit “Where the Crawdads Sing” for the murder-mystery driving its plot. The two young women at its heart, naive Ada and toughened Matilda, are drawn together by a dangerous secret that leads them to hide out in the titular stilt house, with very few who know the truth, like the longtime midwife Gertie.

Time will tell, Mustian told The Dispatch, if it is indeed made into a movie.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did your upbringing in Natchez contribute to the way you described the Trace, the setting of your book?
The Natchez Trace was a backdrop to much of my childhood. Some of my ancestors lived and died there. So the physical landscape was always familiar to me. The contrast between the natural beauty of that area and the political and social landscape of the 1920s, and of my own years there, became an underlying theme of the novel.

Were any of the incidents in the book inspired by true stories?
While none of the scenes were inspired by specific incidents that I was aware of while writing, much of what takes place in the story is representative of the sorts of things that did happen in Mississippi, and the Deep South in general, in the period in which the book is set.

The one exception is a brief mention of the Carrollton Courthouse Massacre. That was an actual historical event.

What gave you the idea for Matilda to pass notes about the racial violence she witnessed to a Black-owned newspaper in the North through secret messages?
Matilda’s hiding messages in packages she sent to the newspaper was born entirely of my imagination, although the need for secrecy and the lack of trust she had in institutions such as the post office is certainly rooted in history. There were many Black-owned newspapers and other publications like the one portrayed in the book, and it was not a stretch to imagine that the discovery of someone like Matilda sending those kinds of articles could have put a person’s life at risk.

In addition to the racial dynamics of 1920s Mississippi, your book deals with gender roles. What do you want readers to take away about the women we encounter in the book?
That sometimes what seems like the smallest of steps is an enormous stride for someone as emotionally broken down as Ada was.

That Gertie, a woman who came from a world of few options, made a life for herself in which she could stand on her own porch and decide when and to whom she would offer her services.

Though the past was always just over her shoulder, Matilda, as she puts it in the book, did what she needed to do to find a way around “all those low expectations.”

Does your writing always take root in Mississippi, or was this a unique case?
Because Mississippi is where I came of age, the place I know in that intimate, from-there way, my work tends to gravitate back there again and again.

I’m working now on a new novel set in Depression-era Mississippi and in North Carolina a few decades later, grateful every day for the warm response The Girls in the Stilt House has garnered.

Emily Liner is the owner of Friendly City Books, an independent bookstore and press in Columbus.