{"id":4858,"date":"2023-03-03T07:05:10","date_gmt":"2023-03-03T15:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4858"},"modified":"2023-03-03T07:05:10","modified_gmt":"2023-03-03T15:05:10","slug":"jesse-sutanto-vera-wongs-unsolicited-advice-for-murderers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/jesse-sutanto-vera-wongs-unsolicited-advice-for-murderers\/","title":{"rendered":"Jesse Sutanto: Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This charming, hilarious, sweet and beautiful book is a real breath of fresh air.\u00a0 Vera Wong owns a tiny and underappreciated tea store in San Francisco.\u00a0 She\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Then one morning (very very early, as Vera likes to get up at 4:30), Vera comes downstairs \u2013 she lives above the shop \u2013 to start out on her morning walk when she discovers a dead man in the middle of her floor.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The police really don\u2019t want her help and don\u2019t seem to take the dead man too seriously.\u00a0 As Vera is sure it\u2019s murder, she decides to investigate on her own.<\/p>\n

Before long, Vera has assembled her suspects \u2013 also known as the charming cast of characters for this novel.\u00a0 The dead man turns out to have richly deserved his fate, however it came to him, and it\u2019s not long before Vera is not only cooking delicious feasts for the man\u2019s widow, Julia, and her toddler daughter, but she\u2019s 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\u2019s kinder, shyer twin.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Vera is a force of nature.\u00a0 She doesn\u2019t have much use for the cops, young people\u2019s habits, sleeping in, slacking off, or failing to eat home cooked food.\u00a0 She\u2019s bossy, judgy, and completely loveable, and it\u2019s not long before all of her \u201csuspects\u201d are doing her bidding and slowly but surely, she makes their lives better.\u00a0 Happily this is accomplished not in a corny way but in a funny and really pretty believable way.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

I enjoyed the characters so much I *almost* forgot about the mystery part.\u00a0 The suspect pool is tiny, and I couldn\u2019t imagine whodunnit.\u00a0 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. \u00a0And the food!\u00a0 This is one of those books (like Mia Manasala\u2019s Tita Rosie\u2019s kitchen series) where the food almost jumps off the page.\u00a0 I guarantee you\u2019re going to be hungry or at the very least want one of Vera\u2019s specially mixed teas.\u00a0 Long may Vera reign. — Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This charming, hilarious, sweet and beautiful book is a real breath of fresh air.\u00a0 Vera Wong owns a tiny and underappreciated tea store in San Francisco.\u00a0 She\u2019s 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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[454,484,1094,1096,444,1095,1093],"class_list":["post-4858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-harper-collins","tag-humor","tag-jesse-q-sutanto","tag-nosy-old-lady","tag-san-francisco","tag-teashop","tag-vera-wongs-unsolicited-advice-for-murderers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4858"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4872,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4858\/revisions\/4872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}