People always say that your wedding day is the happiest day of your life, but honestly, people should try solving murders more often.
Jesse Q. Sutanto, Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers
Many of us who read or watch murder mysteries probably wonder from time to time how we might do if we had a murder to solve. Most likely, of course, we would be terrible at it. But when Vera Wong finds a body in her Chinatown tea shop, she has no doubt at all that she can do a better job at finding the killer than the incompetent police. They even think it's an accidental death. What fun would that be?
Vera Wong is a 60-something widow whose tea shop has just one customer, even though the sign out front boasts that it is "world famous." She needs a little excitement in her life, and the body of Marshall Chen provides that. His death is determined to be from exposure to bird dander, to which he was allergic.
Vera quickly settles on four suspects, each with a reason to kill Marshall. They include his neglected wife Julia, his resentful twin brother Oliver, and Sana and Riki, two people Marshall had betrayed in his nonstop efforts to get rich by using others.
The trouble is, Vera comes to love her suspects. She moves in with Julia and encourages her to realize her dream of becoming a photographer while babysitting her daughter. Oliver is a nice young man who was once Julia's best friend before Marshall came between them. Sana is a talented artist whose paintings were stolen by Marshall; Riki has computer skills that Marshall took advantage of.
While trying to determine which of them might be a murderer, Vera sets about improving each of their lives, while each of them helps improve her own.
Sutanto's novel is as warm and cuddly as as murder mystery can be. And it contains a nifty mystery that Vera Wong, not the police, manages to solve.
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