Murder and a Cup of Tea by Theresa Gauthier

A review of  Jesse Q. Sutanto's Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

    While reading Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto, I thought I might not finish the book. My first impression was that the sleuth couldn't be effective,  but as I read, my opinion began to change.

Sutanto offers up a cozy mystery with a sleuth who watches too many police dramas, and has a script in her head as to how things should be handled—she will make you cringe at times—Vera Wong operates a tea house called Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse. She calls it that because Vera Wang is famous and Vera Wong is not. She thought it would help sales.

Vera lives her life by a strict schedule. Up each morning at 4:30 and texting her son almost immediately to make sure he doesn’t sleep all day, then a long walk and back for breakfast and opening her teahouse. One day her strict routine is upended when she goes downstairs from her apartment and finds a dead body on the floor in her shop.

She calls the police, of course, but she also tidies up and prepares a special tea for them that she’s sure will not only help them focus, but also show them how helpful she is and make them all regulars.

The police, of course, are less than impressed by both the tea and her attempts to tell them things about the crime scene that she’s noticed. Her astonishment that there isn’t a mass of people dusting for fingerprints, and holding back crowds outside her shop make her question how effective this team of investigators will be.

What follows is less focused on the police activity and more focused on Vera’s assumptions on how a crime is investigated and the clues she’s sure the police have overlooked.

She has four young suspects—people who would have reason for wanting the dead man dead. Instead of staying objective,  she’s busy cooking for them, telling them what to do and flat out revealing to them that they’re on her suspect list. 

The police determine it was an accidental death, but Vera doesn’t believe that. Unbeknownst to her, they haven’t stopped investigating, and they’ve made some interesting discoveries of their own. 

Vera’s Tea House has seen better days. She really has only one regular customer, and she seems to be opening each morning out of habit more than anything else. 

When the tea house is broken into, Vera’s new friends come to her aid, cleaning up, making long overdue repairs, and pulling the place together. Soon, Vera moves in with the victim’s wife and daughter—before she’s cleared Mom from her suspect list—and while she cooks, encourages, and meddles in their lives, they find themselves opening up to her, to each other, and even welcoming the motherly attention.

In truth, Vera seems to be just what these four people need in their lives. Aside from her amazing cooking, they begin to like each other, to pursue interests they’d abandoned, and to enjoy their lives more than they had in years. Vera, too, seems to thrive on their company. She’s motivated to cook again—she’s been subsisting on easy to cook items since her son moved out and her husband died, and the elaborate cooking she does now—for her murder suspects as well as for the police—seems to awaken something in her that’s long been dormant. 

Will this fragile, nascent new family manage to stick together once the truth comes out, or is this at best a temporary harbor for these wayward, lost souls? Of course, this isn’t the only question. Was the death a murder? If so, who did it and why? Is it one of these four suspects that did the deed? Who is the mysterious figure that is spotted more than once watching some of them? What shady deals was the victim into that created so much chaos and animosity?

You’ll find all the answers at Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse!