Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (2023) by Jesse Sutanto is a cozy mystery about 60-year-old Vera Wong, a bored, lonely woman looking for a new lease on life—which comes in the form of a corpse on the floor of her tea shop. She sets out to solve the crime herself, and in the process, she meets four young people who need the mothering that she was born to give.

This guide is based on the Kindle edition published by Penguin Publishing Group in 2023.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss a murder.

Plot Summary

Sixty-year-old Vera Wong is bored and lonely: Her husband has died, her son lives in another city, and her beloved tea shop has only one customer, her friend Alex Chen. Alex comes to the shop daily to visit Vera and talk about his favorite son. They bond over their regret that the current generation doesn’t venerate their elders the way they themselves did when they were young. Suddenly, Vera’s life changes when she discovers a corpse on the floor of her shop—later revealed to be a man named Marshall Chen. She calls the police and takes a flash drive she finds in his fist. She feels both disappointed and vindicated when the police dismiss the death as natural. Vera decides she is the best person to investigate the murder.

Reasoning that a murderer always returns to the scene of the crime, Vera puts an obituary in the local newspaper and waits for suspects to arrive. Her suspects are Riki, Sana, Oliver, and Julia, all of whom have reasons to hate Marshall. Marshall cheated Riki and Sana and also intimidated his wife, Julia, and young daughter, Emma, before walking out on them on the day of the murder. He also scapegoated his twin brother, Oliver, causing their father to believe Oliver was a troublemaker and Marshall was a golden boy. When the twins were teenagers, Oliver was in love with Julia, but Julia fell in love with Marshall. Taking the four suspects under her wing, Vera is delighted to feed them and promote romantic matches while parsing which of them is the killer. Her particular joy is non-suspect Emma, whom she encourages to call her “Grandma Vera.”

Meanwhile, Officer Gray’s investigation reaches a dead end when she reports Marshall died from an allergy to bird dander, which was found in his stomach. Vera is disappointed and saddened to lose both her adventure and her new young friends. However, when her shop is vandalized, she summons her suspects and relaunches the investigation. Julia invites Vera to move in with her and Emma while the other suspects repair Vera’s shop. Vera settles into Julia’s home as if she always lived there. She continues to adore Emma, who blossoms under her guidance. Eventually, she narrows down her suspects to Oliver and Julia: Julia received a life insurance settlement after Marshall’s death, and Oliver wrote the first draft of a novel in which a man plans to punish his twin brother for a life of cheating and cruelty, and both suspects knew about Marshall’s allergy.

Julia finds Oliver’s draft on Vera’s bed and realizes the characters are based on Marshall, Oliver, and herself. She learns that Oliver was in love with her and now suspects that he is trying to take Marshall’s place. While she is reading the draft, Officer Gray arrives to question her about a life insurance policy. While there, she picks up the draft, recognizes its content, and takes it. Shortly after, she arrives at Oliver’s house with a search warrant. Officer Gray reveals that she read his draft and asks what the protagonist planned to do to his twin.

Later, Vera gathers her suspects for a climactic reveal in which she hopes to determine whether Oliver or Julia is the killer. Oliver arrives late, furious with Vera for giving his draft to Officer Gray. Julia comes to her defense and confronts Oliver’s crush. In the ensuing argument, Vera realizes that neither Oliver nor Julia is the killer. She then admits she vandalized her own shop. She had noticed things out of place and assumed the culprit was looking for Marshall’s flash drive, so she exaggerated the damage so everyone would take it seriously. Vera then explains the flash drive itself. The suspects are furious that she took advantage of them, and Julia kicks her out of her house.

A heartbroken Vera returns to her shop. She spends the next three days grieving before her friends come to check on her. Riki finds her dehydrated and unconscious in bed. Vera’s friends gather in the hospital and resolve their differences. When Vera is released from the hospital, her friends gather in her shop, and as she makes tea, she realizes who the killer must be. She asks Oliver for his father’s name and confirms that her friend Alex is his and Marshall’s father. She confronts Alex, who confesses everything: After a lifetime of believing Marshall was a golden boy, he finally learned the truth. He was so horrified that he served Marshall a tea with bird’s nest. Dying, Marshall broke into Vera’s shop, hoping it would serve as a clue for his death, and clutched a flash drive to make his death appear more suspicious. With the murder solved, Vera moves back in with Julia while her friends finish restoring her shop to its former glory. Her business picks up, and she revels in looking after her new family.