Jesse Q. Sutanto has created an unforgettable (if sometimes annoying) character in Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (2023) and Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (On a Dead Man) (2025)! I so enjoyed the audiobooks, each narrated by Eunice Wong.
Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Vera Wong is a widow, set in her ways of waking up at 4:30 am in her apartment above her teahouse, taking a brisk walk every morning, multi-texting her still-single son who is a successful lawyer but not yet married, and then settling in for a long day with few customers. She has too much time and not enough to do–until one morning she wakes up to find a dead man on the floor of her teahouse. She does call the police after looking around the body herself, but she doesn’t trust that they will be able to solve this–she is certain that the man–Marshall Chen–has been murdered, but they say he had an allergic reaction. Bah!
When several people come around the teahouse, including Marshall’s widow Julia and young daughter Emma, his brother Oliver, Riki, an Indonesian programmer, and Sana, a South Asian art student, Vera is certain that one of them is the murderer–why else would they show up at her tea shop when they’d never done so before? And Detective Selena doesn’t seem to be doing her job!
The chapters alternate perspectives from Vera, Julia, Oliver, Riki, and Sana, and we quickly find out that no one is really sad that Marshall has died, and they all seem to have had something they want to hide. Vera gathers them all up and questions them, and creates a found family as she keeps trying to figure this murder out. She is overbearing and over-the-top, but she also has a heart of gold, taking Julia and Emma (who was written as possibly being on the autism spectrum) under her wing, cooking for and feeding them and anyone else she can, as she investigates.
The resolution of the mystery was a twist I didn’t see coming, and I so enjoyed the ride, I had to immediately borrow Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (On a Dead Man).
With her former suspects now considered her found family, and her son Tilly now having moved in with Detective Selena, and the prospect of grandchildren more likely than ever, Vera isn’t nearly as lonely as she was at the beginning of the first book. But she still doesn’t have as much to do as she likes. When she meets a distressed young woman named Millie hanging around outside the police station, she invites her back to the teahouse, and as always, she knows just the right tea to give her. Millie tells her about her friend who has disappeared, but Millie runs out of the shop before Vera gets much more than a look at a photo on Millie’s phone. Later, she is snooping around Tilly and Selena’s apartment while cat sitting for them, and finds a case file–the dead man is none other than Millie’s friend. But he doesn’t have the same name–the police think he is Xander Liu, who seems to have been a social media influencer.
As in the first book, there are many suspects as Vera starts her investigation. And this time the stakes seem to be much higher. But Vera still does what she does, becoming a social media star herself as she tries to figure out who killed Xander. Now the question is whether Selena can find Millie before she has the same fate?
These books were pure entertainment for me–I was amused and could not stop listening! I consider them generally weight neutral, although Vera’s daily brisk walk is intended so that she “keeps her figure” and Millie’s “mother” keeps her on a strict diet as well, so I will have to note some anti-fatness as well. Nevertheless, body size and shape are not major themes in either book.
Reading While Fat 