Literary comfort food in the guise of a quirky whodunit.
Investigating a murder gives a lonely widow purpose.
Every day at 4:30 a.m., Vera Wong Zhuzhu, 60, wakes without an alarm; texts her son, Tilbert, to say he’s sleeping his life away; and takes a brisk walk around San Francisco’s Chinatown before returning to open her business, Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse. (The name isn’t a typo but a calculated choice; “even white people” have heard of Vera Wang.) While fellow immigrants used to frequent the shop, now it has only one regular customer, and though Vera and her late husband paid off the building’s mortgage years ago and she lives upstairs, the utilities alone are sapping her savings. Solitude and irrelevance are wearing on Vera until she comes downstairs one morning to find a male stranger dead on the floor. Vera calls the police, who determine that the man—Marshall Chen, 29—likely broke in and then overdosed. Vera, however, believes it was homicide, seeing as Marshall died clutching a USB drive. Granted, the cops don’t know about the drive, as Vera pocketed it before picking up the phone, but that’s probably for the best; “nobody sniffs out wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands.” Gentle humor and abundant heart elevate Sutanto’s spirited mystery, which focuses primarily on the tender relationships that form between Vera and her four main suspects. A kaleidoscopic third-person narrative allows Sutanto to fully develop each character, investing readers in their fates. Vivid sensory descriptions of the custom teas Vera concocts and the elaborate feasts she prepares further heighten the feel-good appeal.
Literary comfort food in the guise of a quirky whodunit.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780593546178
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A lovingly evoked postwar idyll that could just as well have been titled A Christmas Miracle.
Newly promoted Chief Inspector Ian Rutledge’s latest case echoes A Christmas Carol in ways that only begin with the season.
Rutledge’s plan to spend the 1921 holiday with his sister’s family are briskly dismissed by a summons from Chief Superintendent Markum, who reports that Lord Braxton, aka Col. Edward Braxton, has been struck down by a mounted horseman who left him for dead. Braxton, who’s demanding at the best of times, wants to keep the details of this event as private as possible, and he’s decided from Rutledge’s wartime service that he’s the ideal choice to investigate and keep under Braxton’s thumb. Traveling to Cottams House, in the Kentish village of Hartsham, Rutledge finds Braxton every bit as imperious and short-tempered as he expected. But although Braxton is such an obvious candidate for murder that he assures Rutledge he’ll never live to see Christmas, his neighbors and household staff seem attached to him; only Henry White, who constantly blames Braxton for military orders that led to the death of White’s only son in France, seems to have a motive to kill him. Readers acquainted with the franchise will appreciate from the beginning that Rutledge’s inquiries here are much more invested in exploring the natural, social, and seasonal qualities of Braxton’s world than in identifying the guilty party; others will have to adjust their expectations in order to accept a climactic revelation that seems more clearly borrowed from Dickens or the Gospels than from any of the evidence Rutledge has uncovered.
A lovingly evoked postwar idyll that could just as well have been titled A Christmas Miracle.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781613166895
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.
Lt. Eve Dallas is sucked into a murder that may well be overshadowed by another crime—and by the news that Roarke, her billionaire husband, is implicated in both felonies in an unexpected and troubling way.
Disturbed from her sleep, Aileen Carville arises to discover her wealthy husband, Nathan Barrister, coshed to death by a heavy amethyst from the collection of his late father, Zip Global founder Henry J. Barrister. His corpse is lying outside an open vault that everyone in the family insists they hadn’t known about until a couple of months ago, and it’s filled with priceless paintings and sculptures and jewels taken years ago from an A-list of museums, one of which—the Royal Suite, a legendary emerald setting—has evidently been stolen once again. The bombshell revelation that Henry must have commissioned the thefts himself leads to two questions—how did the thief who killed Nathan know about the vault and its contents, and what possessed Nathan’s wealthy father to steal and hide all these goodies in the first place?—that are much more interesting than whodunit, though only one of them will be satisfactorily answered. Another bombshell revelation follows: Roarke’s confession to Dallas that he stole the Royal Suite from London’s Tate Gallery when he was still a teenager, years before he turned away from a life of crime himself. Since Interpol is much more interested in the theft than the murder, there’s a real danger that they’ll decide Roarke was once again the thief. So, Dallas faces the double challenge of solving the crimes and keeping her beloved husband out of the frame.
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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