What’s to like: Even though this book is a murder mystery, it doesn’t fail to ooze warmth at any point.
This book starts off with the description of the monotonous schedule of a widowed, geriatric Asian woman, Vera Wong, who runs a tea shop called "Vera Wang's World Famous Teahouse", which isn’t quite true given the evident emptiness of the shop in San Francisco. Like every other Asian parent, she truly believes kids can be the best versions of themselves if they just wake up early. She only has one loyal customer, Alex, who comes to the shop to drink his regular tea, and Vera always sends him her unique concoctions for his ailing wife, Lily, to drink at home. One day, she wakes up and goes down to her teashop to find a dead man in the centre of the floor and calls the police.
Julia, having just had a fight with her husband Marshall—which ended with him leaving her and their baby daughter for good the previous night—wakes up and decides to ruminate over the pieces of her broken marriage. She piles all of his stuff into garbage bags and leaves them by the side of her door. She hears her doorbell ring and opens it to find the police waiting outside. They inform her that her husband has been found dead in a teashop (yes, Vera's teashop) and that they would like to know if she knows about his whereabouts.
Oliver, Marshall's twin brother (eerily alike in looks, but nothing alike in personality), gets to know about his brother's death. He is worried that the police might pin it on him, which in itself is suspicious. He was also Julia's closest friend before she met Marshall, and he has always been compared to his brother his whole life, which has built a kind of resentment in him and mangled his self-confidence.
Riki, an engineer who somehow knows Marshall and has had an altercation with him, also comes to the teashop, claiming to be a reporter wanting to get some details about the murder, but is actually trying to see if the police are going to pin it on him.
Sana, an artist who is dealing with artist’s block and has a mother who constantly pressures her, also turns up at the teashop claiming to be running a true-crime podcast. She pries for details about Marshall's death while also trying, like the others, to see if it clears her name from being taken as a suspect.
Vera, having nothing else to do and being very nosy and inquisitive by nature, thinks she is helping the police by drawing a chalk outline around the body, like she has seen in detective shows. But the police do not take it kindly and think that she is going out of bounds. What they don’t know is that she has also kept a key piece of evidence—a pen drive from Marshall's pocket—with her. She starts her own investigation and gets her four suspects—Julia, Oliver, Riki, and Sana—together to try to deduce which one of them is the killer by verifying their stories in a very maternal way—through her aromatic and heartwarming food.
This book felt like a big, warm bowl of soup—it has all the flavours required to make the story interesting and keep you guessing about Marshall's death till the end, while also making it so fulfilling with all the love and concern that Vera showers on all four of them, treating them like her son Tilly. Watching how all of them end up reciprocating that love and form a found family is truly heartwarming. What connection each of them has to Marshall, how it turns into a motive, and what the secret behind his death is—read the book to find out!
Favourite line: “Young people should be moving fast, take the world by its male genitalia, and so on.”
Comments
Post a Comment