Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers is a charming and heartwarming mystery novel by Jesse Q. Sutanto, set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Vera Wong is a widowed Chinese woman in her sixties, who owns a tea shop called Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse. She intentionally uses the name of fashion designer Vera Wang to attract customers, without success. Her teahouse is hardly world-famous. In fact, she only has one regular customer, an older man whose wife has Alzheimer’s and who can never stay for very long. Vera lives above her teahouse and gets up at exactly 4:30 every morning. She doesn’t understand why anyone, especially young people, would want to sleep late. She has a son, Tilbert, whom she calls Tilly even though he prefers to go by Bert, who is a lawyer, and she is always texting him to find out if he’s awake and follows him on social media to see if he finally has a girlfriend. Vera always wants things done in a certain way, and she is formidable and overbearing, and not very likeable at first, but she grows on you. Her warmth and kindness emerge as the novel goes along.
Vera’s precise routine is interrupted one morning when she comes downstairs to open her shop and finds a dead body. She calls the police and makes tea for them, but they don’t seem interested in the tea or, particularly, in the dead body. They seem inclined to think the man died of natural causes. Vera, who loves crime shows like CSI, draws an outline around the body with a sharpie to make the police’s work easier for them, but, of course, they don’t appreciate it. Convinced that the man was murdered, Vera decides that she will do a better job of solving the crime than the police would, and she conceals a vital clue from them: she takes a flash drive that she found on the body. Thinking that the murderer will come back to the scene of the crime to claim the flash drive, she waits for customers to come to her shop.
Sure enough, four people show up, and Vera immediately considers them suspects. The dead man, Marshall Chen, was a horrible, nasty person, and all four suspects had reasons to kill him. One is Marshall’s widow, Julia, who had been subjected to emotional and verbal abuse from him. He had left her and their two-year-old daughter Emma the night before he died. Marshall had also treated Emma terribly because she’s still nursing at the age of two and a half and doesn’t talk to anyone except her mother (but when she does, it’s in complete sentences). Another suspect is Marshall’s quieter twin brother Oliver. Their father had treated Oliver as the inferior twin and Marshall as the golden boy. Oliver and Julia had been best friends in high school, when Oliver fell in love with Julia, who thought of him only as a friend and then married Marshall. They had grown apart since then, with Oliver naturally feeling resentful toward Marshall.
The other two suspects are two young people, computer programmer Riki and artist Sana. Riki has come from Indonesia, hoping to earn enough money to bring his younger brother to the US to attend a school for gifted children. Marshall offered him a lot of money to write a malicious program to scam people and, despite his guilty conscience, Riki agrees because he’s so desperate for the money. Then, after he writes the program, Marshall refuses to pay him. Sana, who comes from India, is the daughter of a famous author. She was one of the people who was scammed by the program Riki wrote for Marshall. As part of the deal, she signed over the rights to her art to Marshall, and now she suffers from artist’s block because of what he did to her.
Vera serves tea to her four suspects and cooks delicious Chinese meals for them. They warm to her and become friends with each other. After someone breaks into Vera’s shop and vandalizes it, she moves in with Julia and Emma. She forms a bond with the little girl, who becomes like a granddaughter to her. And she takes Sana for picnics on the beach, where the young artist starts to draw again: pictures drawn with a bamboo stick. As Vera tells her, the water will wash away the pictures, so she doesn’t have to worry if they’re bad. The suspects help Vera rebuild her shop after the break-in, and they become like a family. They’re closer to Vera than her own son is. The matchmaking Vera thought, at the beginning, that Riki and Sana would make a good couple, and soon enough, they develop feelings for each other, even though Sana is unaware that Riki wrote the program Marshall used to scam her.
Vera knows, however, that, as much as she loves these young people, one of them must be a murderer, and she’ll have to turn the culprit over to the police. But she hates the thought of doing that, especially because they seem so nice, and Marshall was such a horrible person. Eventually she gets them to tell her their secrets. I will not spoil the ending by saying who the killer is, but I will say that the plot takes an unexpected turn, which I probably should have seen coming.
I loved the character of Vera. As I said, she seems unlikable at first, but she has such kindness in her that you overlook her bossy and judgmental side. She truly cares for these four people, even though they’re suspects in a murder, and they come to care for her. And the meals she cooks make you hungry for Asian food. There is also a lot of humor in the book, and I especially enjoyed the rivalry between Vera and her neighbor, the owner of a Chinese French patisserie. Everyone except Vera loves the pastries there, but Vera has nothing good to say about her rival. The author, Jesse Q. Sutanto, is Indonesian-Chinese, and I have read that Vera is based on her own mother. I have heard that this is meant to be the first in a series, and that there is the possibility of a movie or TV series. I certainly look forward to seeing more of Vera. The book is nominated for the prestigious Edgar Award (the Oscar of mystery novels) for best paperback original, and it certainly deserves it.
Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers is available from the Browsing Collection of the Shapiro Undergraduate Library and the Browsing Collection of the Flint Frances Willson Thompson Library.