Few friends can say, like the characters in Jesse Q. Sutanto’s highly entertaining novel Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, that what brought them together was a murder. Fewer still, I think, could say that a murder was when their lives started to change for the better.
Vera Wong is an older Chinese American woman who doesn’t have nearly enough to do. She spends her time making tea in her shop for her one remaining customer and constantly texting her clearly exasperated son. All that changes when she arrives at her shop only to discover the body of Marshall Chen sprawled across the floor. The spry lady leaps into action by, first, calling the police; second, using a sharpie to outline the body; and, third, making her best intelligence-sparking tea for whoever arrives to investigate. As cops are wont to do, however, they bustle Vera aside so that they can do their jobs. Vera is deeply unimpressed. She’s so unimpressed (and bored enough) that she decides to solve the case herself.
The day after the body is discovered, Vera has a small boom in business when people start to arrive at the teashop and pretend not to snoop. Over cups of what sounds like absolutely amazing tea, Vera bullies her way into the lives of a young computer programmer, an artist, a handyman, and the widow of the deceased. There’s simply no arguing with Vera but, it seems, that her “victims” are kind of glad that they have someone to push them out of their various professional and social ruts.
The mystery of how a man came to drop dead in the middle of Vera’s teashop is solved, after a few twists and turns, but what really makes this novel is the way that Vera and her four “suspects” become a found family. Vera needed people to take care of (more than she needed a career as an amateur detective) and now she can lavish her attention, unsolicited advice, and recipes on more than just her frazzled son. Not only is this book as emotionally warming as a cup of good tea, it also made me laugh out loud several times as Vera runs roughshod over everyone she meets and blunders her way through a twisty mystery.
