Review:
Vera Wong is a lonely widow with an adult son who doesn't talk to her nearly as much as she'd like. She lives above her tea shop in Chinatown, and although she's confident that her tea is the best in the world, her shop has seen better days and now only has one regular customer. Her life doesn't exactly have a lot of excitement in it, so it's a shock when she goes downstairs one day and discovers a dead man in the middle of her shop.
Vera is convinced it was murder. The police are less sure, which convinces Vera that she is the best possible person to investigate was really happened. And so she does, and comes up with lots of suspects right away. They're all nice young people: Julia, wife of the deceased and now a single mother; Sana, who says she's doing research for her true crime podcast; Riki, who says he's a reporter; and Oliver, the twin brother of the deceased. They're all good company (you do not say no when Vera Wong offers you food), so it's a shame that one of them must be a murderer.
I read this because I'd really enjoyed Sutanto's YA thrillers and wanted to see what her books for adults were like. This turned out to be delightful. Although I suppose it would technically be classified as a cozy mystery, the mystery wasn't nearly as much a focus of the book as the relationships and found family elements were. Vera was a force to be reckoned with, and once she entered the other characters' orbits, they couldn't help but get sucked in. One minute she'd be feeding everybody delicious sounding foods (this book made me hungry for things I've never even heard of before), and the next she'd be bluntly interrogating everyone about whether they were the murderer. If I'd thought that one of the other characters was actually a killer, it might have been alarming, but as it was it was just amusing.
The book alternated between Vera, Julia, Sana, Riki, and Oliver's POVs, and I came to like and/or feel sympathy for all of the characters. Marshall, the dead guy, sounded like a horrible husband, and it was lovely to see Julia blossom as Vera began to become part of her family. Sana, Riki, and Oliver were all hiding things and had reasons for hating Marshall, but at the same time none of their interactions with Vera screamed "killer" to me. Like Vera, I hoped none of the characters would turn out to be responsible.
I figured out part of the story surrounding Marshall's death a while before the characters did, although I only had a few of the pieces and didn't make all of the connections. While the mystery aspects were decent enough, the characters and their interactions are definitely what made this book shine.
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