★★★★☆ Vera's rescue

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

Jesse Q Sutanto

There are six main characters in Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, and all of them are broken. Five are people who had relationships with the man who died, Marshall Chen. They are his twin brother Oliver, his wife Julia and two-year-old daughter Emma, Riki, a programmer from Indonesia, and Sana, an artist, who did business with Marshall. Even two-year-old Emma is not entirely all right when the book starts.

The sixth main character, of course, is Vera Wong herself. Vera is a stereotypical Chinese mother. She is proud of being a Chinese Mom:

"I am mother too. Actually, I am Chinese mother. You can’t get better than that. We raise the best children in the world, you just look at any hospital, all the surgeon are Chinese.” Vera beams with pride, as though she has personally been responsible for all the surgeons in every hospital.

Vera runs a tea-shop called "Vera Wang's [sic] World-Famous Teahouse". She has Chinese aunty super-powers (figuratively only) of cooking, cleaning, and ordering people around. It is virtually impossible to say "No" to Vera. Also self-confidence. Vera knows that she is right about everything. Like most people who are certain that they are right, Vera is often wrong.

But Vera is not OK. Her tea-house has only one customer. And Vera is lonely. Her husband is dead. Her son, Tilbert, a successful lawyer, rarely visits. (Tilly, as Vera calls him, is often presented as a villain, an undutiful son, in the novel, but honestly, I sympathize. If your mother is Vera Wong, freedom from her probably feels like a necessity of mere survival.)

So, Vera gets up one morning, comes down to her tea-shop, and finds a stranger's body on the floor. She swipes the flash drive in his hand, determined to investigate the murder herself. ("Murder"? who said anything about a murder? Vera, who watches TV shows like CSI, leaps instantly to the conclusion that it's a murder, and that she is more qualified to investigate than the police.) In the course of her investigation she makes the acquaintance of Riki, Sana, Oliver, Julia, and Emma. In her officious way she invades the life of each of them and fixes what's broken in them.

I was not sold on Vera at first. She is hard-working and competent and kind and funny (though usually unintentionally), but she has no boundaries and is often offensive (again, unintentionally). But then I thought, "Aha! I see what Jesse Sutanto is doing! She's giving Vera's character room to grow."

Well, it would be a spoiler to tell you if I was right or not. I was right. But I will tell you that the story builds to a climax, which was really splendid. If I were to rate the book on the last 20%, I would give it five stars.

Now, two small points. First, the mystery is, in my opinion, the least interesting thing about the book. The solution was, in every respect I cared about, obvious from the start. By that I mean not that it was obvious who, if anyone done it, but that it was obvious who did not. Second, the title Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, has almost nothing to do with the plot. At no point in the book does Vera, even in her imagination, produce advice for murderers. In her Acknowledgements Sutanto explains that when she wrote the pitch for the book, she didn't have a plot. Her agent and publisher were enthusiastic, however, so she pushed aside an ongoing project to get this one out quickly. The title and description from that pitch became the title and first blurb for the novel that quickly resulted. (I saw that initial blurb, which contained the idea of advice for murderers, but it has since been replaced with a blurb written by someone who has read the finished book.)

So, very fun little book with a superb ending. If you're looking for a short, fun read, you probably can't do much better.

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