This charming, hilarious, sweet and beautiful book is a real breath of fresh air. Vera Wong owns a tiny and underappreciated tea store in San Francisco. She’s a widow, and her son is a busy professional, but that does not stop Vera from texting him instructions about sleep, food, and anything else she feels is important. The tea shop is dusty and lonely and most days Vera just has one customer, an older man who leaves after 10 minutes to get back to his wife with Alzheimer’s.
Then one morning (very very early, as Vera likes to get up at 4:30), Vera comes downstairs – she lives above the shop – to start out on her morning walk when she discovers a dead man in the middle of her floor. She calls the police, but as she waits she decides to make tea for them and to trace the outline of the body with a sharpie. The police really don’t want her help and don’t seem to take the dead man too seriously. As Vera is sure it’s murder, she decides to investigate on her own.
Before long, Vera has assembled her suspects – also known as the charming cast of characters for this novel. The dead man turns out to have richly deserved his fate, however it came to him, and it’s not long before Vera is not only cooking delicious feasts for the man’s widow, Julia, and her toddler daughter, but she’s included Sana, a podcaster (or as Vera calls it, a pot catch), Riki, who claims to be a Buzzfeed reporter, and Oliver, the dead man’s kinder, shyer twin. Vera has also moved in with the widow and her daughter, cooking and doing the child care as Julia tries to figure out her life.
Vera is a force of nature. She doesn’t have much use for the cops, young people’s habits, sleeping in, slacking off, or failing to eat home cooked food. She’s bossy, judgy, and completely loveable, and it’s not long before all of her “suspects” are doing her bidding and slowly but surely, she makes their lives better. Happily this is accomplished not in a corny way but in a funny and really pretty believable way. We may all need a little Vera in our lives, and if she can only be accessed through the pages of this witty book, then I hope there are many more installments.
I enjoyed the characters so much I *almost* forgot about the mystery part. The suspect pool is tiny, and I couldn’t imagine whodunnit. The author does not rely on an obvious solution, though Vera, like many another classic detective before her, solves the case with an intuitive leap. And the food! This is one of those books (like Mia Manasala’s Tita Rosie’s kitchen series) where the food almost jumps off the page. I guarantee you’re going to be hungry or at the very least want one of Vera’s specially mixed teas. Long may Vera reign. — Robin Agnew