Many murder mysteries are dark, with the specter of the deceased looming over shocked, grieving, or confused characters throughout the book. Other murder mysteries take a much lighter approach to the genre, and Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers is one of them.
Vera hosts a declining tea house in the midst of an aging San Francisco neighborhood. She spends her mornings on rigorous walks, her mid-mornings tending to her one regular customer, and most other moments harassing her millennial son, Tilly, over text. When a dead man turns up in her shop with a mysterious hard drive in his pocket, she does what any old woman with too much time on her hands would do—she decides to crack the case herself. As Vera gathers a list of suspects and begins probing into their connections to the dead man, Marshall, she realizes that identifying the murderer will be much more difficult than she thought.
The self-confident Vera, with her culinary skills and meddlesome (yet good-natured) personality, forms the powerful core of the book. As she converses with her suspects, her tea is a vehicle through which she can connect with them, earn their trust, and coax information out of them. When she serves milk tea to her suspect Riki, for example, he feels as though she is tapping into his inner thoughts:
“Riki mimics Vera and picks up his second cup of tea gingerly, slurping it the way she does. And this time, he does actually taste the creaminess which she described. It really does taste like milk. He looks down at the tea, which is clear and light and definitely doesn’t look milky. How strange, for something to taste so different from the way it looks. But then again, Riki thinks with a shot of guilt, that’s exactly what he is. Someone pretending to be someone he’s not.”
p. 47
Vera’s investment in the art of cooking and brewing extends to all of her interactions; she even goes so far as to force tea and treats upon the police officers investigating the crime. I greatly enjoyed each of the moments in which she shared the delight of a meal or a pot of tea with another character.
While Vera brings pep to her relationships and nurtures her new friends in very endearing ways, some of the relationships that form among members of her social circle feel undeveloped and uninspiring. A romance between two of Vera’s suspects is shoehorned into the story; while perhaps intended to invoke the same warmth in the reader that Vera does, it feels superficially written at best. And although the point of the book was not necessarily the uncovering of the crime —it was more about the “found family” and the connections formed along the way —the mystery was wrapped up far too hastily to be remotely believable.
My final opinion is that Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers is a feel-good “cozy mystery” that will bring readers warmth, good humor, and culinary delights, but the writing is not very substantive. It’s a great read for an airplane trip or a couple of chilly winter evenings.
Special thanks to the Porter Square Book Club for giving me the opportunity to discuss this book with a great group of Boston residents!
