Vera Wong's guide to snooping (on a dead man)

Prodigious Sutanto presents a second delicious serving of her Vera Wong mysteries, spotlighting the eponymous sprightly sexagenarian tea café proprietor whose meddling is driven as much by relentless kindness as by insatiable curiosity. Vera began extending her family in Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (2023) and continues to lure, and nourish, more lost souls into her toothsome fold. The lynchpin here is Thomas, aka Xander, a young man with a (social media-ed) perfect life who turns up dead, allegedly by suicide. His friend Millie misses him most. His girlfriend, Aimes, seems well, aimless. His manager TJ's business is tanking. His grandfather Qiang Wen is lonelier than ever. Vera's heartstrings--and her irresistible pork buns--reel them in, not only for her unconditional care, but they also happen to be her primary suspects. Meanwhile, Vera's next-door nemesis Winifred has claimed a Korean ancestor in order to justify her Chinese bakery's transformation into a K-destination for kimchi croissants. Not everything is delicious (there are elder-targeting scams, toxic social media, and modern slave trafficking) but Sutanto manages to craft another sumptuous, mysterious feast.

Edgar winner Sutanto's quirky second adventure for the eponymous tea shop owner (after Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers) opens with Vera falling prey to a phone scam. After reporting the incident to Officer Selena Gray--who's dating Vera's son, Tilly--Vera notices a distressed young woman waiting outside the police station. Vera insists on taking the woman, Millie, to her shop, where the woman reveals that her friend Thomas went missing three nights earlier. Then, while feeding Selena and Tilly's cat, Vera stumbles upon Selena's briefcase, which includes a file outlining the apparent suicide of social media influencer Xander Lin. Using her well-honed sleuthing skills, Vera discovers that Xander and Thomas are the same person, and she then proceeds to ingratiate herself with a group of suspects including Xander's girlfriend, talent manager, and grandfather to suss out the young man's fate. Laugh-out-loud antics from the nosy, no-nonsense Vera keep the plot moving at a steady clip, but fans of the first book may be jarred by the somber final reveal. Still, Sutanto's lively storytelling will keep readers on the hook for Vera's next case. Agent: Katelyn Detweiler, Jill Grinberg Literary. (Apr.)

Flush with confidence from her first case, San Francisco's most convivial teahouse owner and self-described "intermediate murder investigator" leaps into a second with both feet. Leaving the local police station, where she's gone to report a phone scammer who's preyed on her, Vera Wong Zhuzhu notices Millie, a frightened young woman who can't seem to bring herself to enter the station. Naturally, Vera invites her home for tea, introduces her to the quasi-family into which she's molded the innocent suspects from her earlier investigation, and gently points out that building superintendent and freelance journalist Oliver Chen would be a particularly good catch. Millie, it turns out, is concerned about the disappearance of her Chinese Indonesian friend Thomas Smith, whose career as media influencer Xander Lin--which Millie knew nothing about--has been cut short by his drowning. Police officer Selena Gray--who's the live-in girlfriend of Vera's son, lawyer Tilly Wong--assumes that the death is accidental, but since Vera's most comfortable when she's catching killers, she hunts down Xander's girlfriend, Aimes (not Amy, just Aimes) and his talent manager, TJ Vasquez, and bombards them with enough mouthwatering dishes and nosey questions to reduce them to tears of gratitude and convince herself that, like Millie and Xander himself, they're definitely hiding something that smells like murder. So, she launches an unlikely new sideline as a social media personality herself in order to spread her net wider. Rollicking as Vera's inquiries are, they ultimately lead to a very dark place, covering the emotional gamut from A to Z. A warmhearted valentine to the families built by the heroine--and an exposé of the costs of false families everywhere. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Sutanto offers a sequel to the award-winning and bestselling Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers. After solving a murder in her teahouse, Vera's life has been good, if boring. When she encounters a young woman looking for her missing friend, who's a jet-setting social media influencer, Vera is on the case. Prepub Alert. Copyright 2024 Library Journal