How Disaster and Dating Apps Made Me a Mystery Writer - Cristina Matta

Chardonnay was the drink. Although I’d only had half a glass, people around me were looking sideways at me. There I was, laughing to myself at the bar of a Tiki restaurant on the river, scribbling furiously with a ballpoint pen on notebook paper. To onlookers, I must have looked like a woman who had imbibed much more.

That was the birth of Pairs: This Dating Site Will Be the Death of You.

I had gone there to break my months-long writer’s block. A kind of quiet, creeping dread had settled in my gut while I sat in front of my laptop struggling through book two of my Cracked Andes Chronicles. Nothing was coming. Worse, my notes were a mess. The story didn’t make sense. I couldn’t connect the characters to their roles in book one in any meaningful way. So I left my computer behind, grabbed paper and pen, and headed to the bar, thinking a change of scenery might shake something loose.

It didn’t. But then I started thinking about a friend who’d been slogging through the chaos of online dating. Every night, she’d send me screenshots of absurd profiles, and we’d howl with laughter at how bizarrely people present themselves online — men and women alike. As I recalled the worst of them, something clicked: a mystery. A satire. A dating app turned crime scene.

That’s why I was laughing out loud at the bar. But honestly? I didn’t mind if people thought I was tipsy. In a way, I was — drunk on possibility.

That’s when Pairs was born.

Naturally, it had to be a mystery. I’ve been reading them since I was a child, starting with Nate the Great, working up to Trixie Belden and anything from Agatha Christie. Books my mom suggested. Mystery novels have always been the thing my mother and I shared most deeply. It’s our language. It’s how we relax, process, bond.

So I created a story around seven fictional dating profiles — all ridiculous, all suspects. One murder. Three possible endings. The reader gets to choose whodunit (and then they are invited to write their own). Each book in the Crack the Case series has that same format, a slightly unhinged mystery with a humorous theme drawn from the messiness of everyday life.

Enter Ned: my fictional detective with a sharp eye, dry wit, and low tolerance for idiocy. On my website, he writes a blog called Ned’s Notes, where he muses about real-life crime scene facts, roasts suspects, and discusses cases with his newfound friend, Bob the Crime Scene Tech. It's satirical. It's absurd. It also lets me sneak in real forensic knowledge in a voice that's 100% Ned.

But behind the laughs and punchlines, there’s another kind of story. One that’s harder to tell. Before there were books and blogs, there was a quake.

It was August 15, 2007. I was in Peru visiting family in the small town of Guadalupe, near Ica, when the 8.1 magnitude earthquake hit.

Lights flickered. Walls cracked. People screamed. The shaking lasted three and a half eternal minutes. When it ended, 500 people had died. The town was 95% destroyed. The third floor of the house I was in had fallen onto the neighbor’s roof. I spent the night crammed in the back of a van with others who had nowhere else to go.

Returning to the U.S. I didn’t have the words to talk about the experience. And honestly, I didn’t want to. But I did write. First, a long email to friends and family, trying to make sense of what I had witnessed and to avoid reliving it in conversation. The guilt of returning to my quiet, comfortable neighborhood only deepened as I learned more about the aftermath of the disaster: looting in the streets, relatives sleeping outside in the cold, children with asthma struggling to breathe through the thick dust that lingered in the air. I don’t have asthma myself, but even I used an inhaler for a month after the quake because of the dust in my lungs, and I left the next day. I could only imagine the people left behind, nowhere to go, no clean air to breathe, food running out.

The real-life account I wrote was well received. Over the next three years, while I was still processing the grief, the story morphed into Tremor in the Hills, the first novel in the Cracked Andes Chronicles. It’s fiction, but it’s grounded in truth: trauma, survival, and moral questions that don’t fade once the ground stops shaking. In it, a young woman returns to post-earthquake Peru to visit family, only to become entangled in a murder tied to corruption, long-buried secrets, and the emotional aftershocks no one talks about.

It took years to finish and several iterations were previously discarded or published. But Tremor in the Hills is finally being released at the end of this year in its strongest form yet and I can’t wait to share it. My hope is that its success will allow me to partner with organizations like Build Change and give back to others who’ve lived through natural disasters.

One story began with a glass of wine and a laugh. The other began in rubble. But both came from the same place: a deep need to make sense of the world — to bring order to chaos, to find healing through fiction, and to turn both pain and absurdity into something lasting.

That’s the power of story. And that’s why I keep writing.

Christy Matta is an award-winning author, educator, and earthquake survivor whose fiction blends humor, suspense, and emotional depth. She is the creator of the satirical Crack the Case series and author of Tremor in the Hills, the first in the Cracked Andes Chronicles.

When she’s not writing, she’s blogging as her crime-solving alter ego, Detective Ned, travelling, or riding roller coasters at the many theme parks in Florida.

Find out more at https://crackthecasebooks.com.

Article published in The Relatable Voice Magazine - September 2025.

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