Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
