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.