Unit testing queries with MongoDB

I'm currently building a rest api and I'm struggling to find the best way to unit test each route.

A route handler performs various things and one of them is to execute a query to mongodb. I can unit test the route handler by using stubs, but if I'm testing the query I cannot stub the query itself, I need to have an in-memory mongodb that I could reset and insert new data for each test.

How do you test queries? I'm thinking that the only real way to ensure that the query does what I need is to use a real mongodb database installed in the testing machine (typically in the same machine used for developing).