Apple Valley mystery writer got her start by killing off her mom

Mindy Mejia killed off her own mother in the first story she ever wrote so it’s hard to disagree with her when she says, “I’ve always been a crime writer. There have always been people dying in my work.”

That first story, about the Twin Cities native’s mom’s funeral, was way back in kindergarten. And its dark themes ended with a trip to the school guidance counselor by her mom, Linda Montgomery.

“She had been very sick when I was young. She had an aggressive form of Crohn’s disease and had many major surgeries, so her existence was really fragile in my mind,” said Mejia, 46, over a matcha latte in Burnsville. “So the counselor told her, ‘No, no she doesn’t want you dead. She’s terrified you’re going to die and this is how she processes that fear.’”

Fortunately, Montgomery is still with us, and Mejia — whose mom fueled her obsession with writing by keeping her supplied with blank journals — is still attracted to dark themes. In “The Whisper Place,” the third in her series of mysteries featuring ex-cop Max and psychic Jonah, the pair investigate the disappearance and possible murder of Darcy, who fled an abusive situation and got a job in a bakery, only to have her past catch up with her again.

Darcy, Max and Jonah all relate to an idea “Whisper Place” explores: Can you change your life? It’s a question Mejia wanted to answer for herself, as well. For the first time, “Whisper” made her feel like she was writing a book that was really about her.

“I was writing while I was in the process of getting a divorce. My ex and I were deciding to separate, so this was as much a question for me as it was the characters. It sounds silly to say they gave me the courage to do it, but it does feel like we came through this together, me and these figments of my imagination. It was life changing,” said Mejia, who has two teenagers (Rory and Logan, named after the “X-Men” characters not the “Gilmore Girls” ones) and adds, “Divorce is never easy but it went as well as it could.”

Mejia already is at work on the fourth — and, she thinks, final — Max-and-Jonah book, in which the changes the characters are trying to make will continue. She said writing about their brave efforts has been a learning experience.

Maybe her personal investment in the themes is why “The Whisper Place” came so easily to Mejia, who’s also a full-time certified public accountant. Set in Iowa City, where Mejia went to college, the writing of “Whisper” flowed easily, without the stops and starts a novel usually involves for her.

Much of the book takes place in the bakery where Darcy works, a bakery loosely inspired by one Mejia frequented when she went to college in Iowa (favorite order: an almond croissant). There again, Montgomery was helpful: “She’s an incredible baker. Growing up in her kitchen and watching her cook was the biggest part of the research.”

Fans of Jonah’s journey — and of the equally conflicted X-Men — will appreciate the extent to which he’s learning to deal with the drawbacks of the psychic abilities that could be thought of as his superpowers. They’re helpful when he’s trying to solve crimes but, as we learn in a painful scene when he’s about to have sex with a woman named Eve, they are not helpful when he can read a partner’s mind and thinks she has consented to something she hasn’t actually verbalized.

Mejia said she’s excited about the places her characters are going in the current book and its follow-up, and that she’d like to spare them more tragedies after that. They were born out of trauma, since Mejia began writing the first in the series, “To Catch a Storm” during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the hope is she’ll leave them in a gentler place.

“I actually love my characters. I hate to torture them. I would like them to pick up the pieces of their lives and move forward and imagine happy things for them after the book ends, so I think I’ll have to be done beating up on them for a while,” said Mejia, who lives in Apple Valley with her kids.

The Whisper Place

By: Mindy Mejia.

Publisher: Atlantic Crime, 312 pages.