Fredericktown Library’s new Branch Manager writes cozy mysteries

The Fredericktown Ozark Regional Library just got a new branch manager.

Shaen Mehl (SHAY-ehn) served as the Youth Director at the Ironton Ozark Regional Library from 2005 to 2014. Now she will schedule programs at the Fredericktown Library after an absence of over a decade. She left to take care of her toddler at the time.

“And I always wanted to write novels,” she said.

Mehl (as Shaen Layle) has published over a dozen books in the cozy mystery or suspense genre, and is a USA Today best seller. She’s now working on another cozy mystery novel, and her first in women’s fiction.

A cozy mystery, she said, is when the novel doesn’t revolve around a murder, but rather arson, or identity theft, or missing people.

“It’s the way that you write about it,” she said. “I really like them because they’re about small towns and eccentric characters.”

Her next novel coming out in April is called A Gift in Time, book one in the Gift Shop Mysteries with Guide Posts, a publisher based in Connecticut.

Another book she’s working on is a “reboot” of the Society of Second Chances series by Deborah Raney, which the publishers placed a lot of ambitions in. But it was published during the Covid pandemic, when book sales were slow. Mehl is writing books 2 and 3, and someone else is writing the fourth.

She said if the original author set up mysterious details or clues of a background character, Mehl is challenged to develop it in the second book.

Like her other novels with Guide Posts, much of a book’s direction comes from them, not from Raney. Mehl sends the publishers a story outline with details like four clues, three suspects, and their backgrounds. She likens it to a puzzle, “like Tetris near the end of it, to tie up all the loose ends and shoehorn all the little clues.”

“It’s kind of harder in a way, because I’m very evenly left brain and right brain,” Mehl said. “And I would always get frustrated because every time I would start a book, I would think there’s got to be a way to make the creative process less frustrating and messy.”

Even though her mysteries may be contemporary, Mehl said, they have through lines connecting them to historical mysteries. Many take place in real areas or renamed versions.

Mehl researched for White Church Bay, a fictional town in Yorkshire, New England, without using the literal name “Robin Hood’s Bay,” so people living there would not feel infringed if she missed some details.

Sometimes she works on “continuity series,” where 25 novels are split between a handful of writers. “It’s one set of characters, one voice and one setting, but they’re trying to tell a sweeping story.”

Sometimes her more natural impulses to write character-driven stories conflict with her demands to follow the assignment, she said. Sometimes “they’ll rip out a character,” and she’ll pivot from there.

“That gets frustrating sometimes,” she said. “But usually if you are not a hot head and you can let it sit for a couple of days and then go back to it, you can usually see the wisdom in what they recommend.”

She tells people it’s like “writers boot camp,” learning how to work within constraints, like other authors in the series, or with monthly book clubs, so your content doesn’t match the ones before or after.

“And every time the creative process just takes over at some point and the story veers off in the direction that you don’t really want it to go. But if you’re being honest with the story, you can’t control where the story’s going or what your character’s doing necessarily.”

Mehl’s training was in creative writing as an undergrad, and then library science for graduate school, where she said she learned how to use both parts of her brain – creative and analytical. Now, with Guide Posts branching out into other genres like suspense and women’s fiction, she hopes to draw more from the left, unpredictable half.

“It’s a bit more emotional and cerebral and you get into the inner landscape of the characters a lot more, which I really like.”

Now that she’s in the library again, she has ideas for projects, and wants to connect with the community.

As Youth Director, she built up the story time program for children and drove around to every library in the circuit, numbering up to hundreds in one year.

As Branch Manager, she is responsible for the adult programming, and admin roles.

In February alone, the library will host a Civil War Couple, and an author to teach children about resilience. In September, she’s planning an author’s fair, where she hopes a friend from out of state in the American Christian Fiction Writers Association with her can visit with a panel of local and distant writers.

Mehl said she loves living closer to home, and the beauty of the area, also with many historical threads, and talking, getting to know people in the community. Some of the routines and their names are different, and the genealogy room gets more use than she remembers, but she said ORL feels more involved this time.

She said she appreciates the reach ORL Director Michelle Swane and Circulations Manager Kessie Osborne have done to “recruit” members to the library and get the word out about programs.

“The thing I’m really passionate about with the job is getting to know people in the community, getting to bring in programs that are going to help people and be a benefit to them.”

Mehl said Fredericktown has lots of historical elements, and influential battles and mining history. While she didn’t grow up reading cozy mysteries, she said in hindsight her childhood influenced her.

“I realized that growing up in a small town helped because cozies are always in a really tight-knit community. And there’s just a lot of things that you learn about social dynamics growing up in a small town that translate really well to writing cozies.”

The library is open Monday-Wed-Fri- 9 a.m. – 5 p.m., and on Tuesday and Thursday 9a.m. – 8p.m. and Saturday 9a.m. – 1p.m.