Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (Jesse Q. Sutanto) - A good premise that falls short of Expectations!

Rating: ⭐⭐

Someone i follow on Twitter recommended this one and said she has been laughing out loud in public reading this book. Now it is difficult, really difficult for an author to pull that off (tears of grief is more doable but tears of laughter - nah!). Very few writers, in my experience can create humor of the lol degree - PG Wodehouse and Somerset Maugham come to mind. I was in a place where i did not want heavy reading and i needed a book that was light, breezy and could get me a few laughs. So full disclosure - it is with this expectation that i picked this one up.

The book starts off on an interesting note. Vera is a 60 year old Chinese American with a penchant for discipline and clear ideas about how people ought to live their lives. She lives alone above her tea shop, that she and her husband ran for many years, till his passing a few years ago. She has a son, who she nags remotely through messages. She keeps herself busy and happy doing what she loves - ie making different unique tea flavours and meddling in people's lives just enough that they don't shoo her off. Her life changes when she goes to open her shop one morning, and finds a body. A Dead Body. In her shop. That she discovers. Probably the most exciting that has happened to her in her life thus far!

Here on, her life's mission becomes the hunt for the killer. She is of course, equipped for this job, what with having watched so many crime series on TV, having a natural ability to sniff out people's secrets, abundant curiosity and the ability to worm her way into people's hearts armed with her cooking prowess. Of course the police don't know how to do their job and Vera must bring the killer to justice all by herself.

Various characters who have direct motive to commit the crime visit her shop on the day the body is found and Vera has her list of suspects ready. There is the wife with a baby daughter who was never treated right by her husband, the twin brother who was always overshadowed by the more charming brother and sundry "business associates" who have probably been wronged in various ways and all have motive. In between all this, Vera investigates, cooks a feast, crosses out suspects from her list, cooks a bit more, ferrets out their secrets, cooks some more and generally pokes her nose into people's lives since she is Chinese and 60 years old and nothing can stop her. She also gives a lot of unsolicited advice to a lot of people, however, at no point does she offer advice to the Murderer. Which was the whole premise to begin with.

The book is engaging and ambles along but beyond a point, the whole premise starts stretching too thin. The plot holes are too many - i will not list them down as that would be a spoiler, but for anyone used to murder stories written by masters like Keigo Higashino or Silva, this is clearly amateurish. The laughter aspect is also muted, and i did not lol anywhere. Vera's parts are written in broken English because that is how she would speak (a bit racist if you ask me). There is a good representation with characters of Chinese, Indian and Indonesian origin thrown in. The 2 year old baby speaks in complete sentences, has flawless logic and also knows a bit of science. The only white character in a book based in US is helpless and has been royally gaslit by her husband all her life.

All in all, a case of over promise and under deliver for me.