Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Lorna was reading this on holiday and, having had to put with quite a few chortles, I thought I'd give it a read as well.

 

Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the tale follows Vera Wong, the owner of a forgotten tea shop, a self-proclaimed tea expert, and a Chinese mother. Vera’s normal routine is to get up at 4:30 a.m, go for a brisk walk, and have a shower before texting her son to remind him to get up and find a wife and then opening up her tea shop. The tea shop is sadly failing and she really has only one regular customer these days.

However, her routine is shattered one morning when she comes down to the shop and finds a dead body on the floor. The man, it's a man, is unknown to her but he's holding a flash drive in the hand so, after calling the police like a good citizen, she pockets the flash drive and then draws an outline around the body in permanent marker (she has no tape) as she's seen them do that on TV and she wants to be helpful. She might also have checked his pockets for clues as well.

Vera is a woman with time on her hands so, when the police fail to check for fingerprints or take DNA samples, she decides it's up to her to solve this crime. So she begins to collect a list of suspects, beginning with anyone that turns up at her shop looking for information about the murder because, as everyone knows, murderers aways return to the scene of the crime!

This one is a gem. It's a very decent, reasonably paced whodunnit that kept me guessing to the end. Vera is a very opinionated person that speaks her mind, regardless of anyone's sensitivities, and she really knows her teas so it's filled with plenty of humour, a fair bit of compassion and plenty of tea.

A thoroughly enjoyable read! 8/10 😀