Blog Tour: Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers – Jesse Sutanto

Tea-shop owner. Matchmaker. Detective?

Sixty-year-old self-proclaimed tea expert Vera Wong enjoys nothing more than sipping a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy ‘detective’ work on the internet (AKA checking up on her son to see if he’s dating anybody yet).

But when Vera wakes up one morning to find a dead man in the middle of her tea shop, it’s going to take more than a strong Longjing to fix things. Knowing she’ll do a better job than the police possibly could – because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands – Vera decides it’s down to her to catch the killer.

Nobody spills the tea like this amateur sleuth

My thoughts: this is very, very funny. Not exactly a surprise from the author of Dial A For Aunts and Four Aunties and a Wedding. Vera owns a small tea shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown and her life is pretty quiet until she finds a dead body in her shop one morning.

Gathering her suspects up, and building a found family along the way, she investigates the death, much to the irritation of Officer Grey at the local police station, who would rather she leave it alone.

Vera is delightful but you definitely don’t mess with her and she’s impossible to say no to. Everyone tries to, but somehow this Chinese Miss Marple bowls you along with her. It might be the mountains of food she keeps making, or just the way she carries on as though no one else spoke, but her determination to solve the mystery of the dead man in the tea shop is compelling.

The people she draws into her orbit, her suspects, slowly come to love her and bond with each other as they’re all lonely. Vera gives them advice and encouragement as well as keeping them very well fed (I was so hungry by the end of this book) so they become less alone and closed off. But does she solve the case? Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out!

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.