Monday 24 April 2023

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Sutanto

Pages: 341 

Publisher: HQ

Released: 30th of March 2023 

Put the kettle on, there’s a mystery brewing…
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.

What I Have to Say 

This book was wonderful, I loved the characters so much. Vera was like no other character I've seen before and yet I could imagine her perfectly. She had such life to her. I would love to go to her tea shop and try her tea, it sounds just like the sort of place I like to go. 

As with all mysteries, obviously, the case was important to the book. But I found the more we got into it, the less I was actually bothered by it. I didn't want to see it solved and see one of the characters I'd grown attached to locked up for murder! I loved them all. But the solution came and I was satisfied with it. It had just the right number of twists to stop it from being predictable and yet the clues were all there in the text. 

I think this is standalone, but I would quite like to see it become a series. Now Vera's got a taste for solving crimes will she really go back to just running the tea shop and managing the people in her life? I'm not ready to be done with this characters yet. 

 4 stars 

My thanks goes to HQ and Netgalley for providing me with this copy for review. 




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