Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

"This is about a very fun character. She’s called Vera Wong and she runs Vera Wang’s Tea House in San Francisco. That’s on purpose: she wants to ghost off the name Vera Wang—but her teahouse is not very successful. She comes down one morning and there is a dead body. She sets out to figure out who the murderer is. She works through four different suspects—you’ve got the journalists, the brother of the dead man, his widow—and she gets to know each of them. She’s really trying to figure out who did it by inserting herself in their lives, which is a unique way to approach solving a mystery. Eunice Wong, who reads the book, does a marvelous job. There is a lot of accent work. There’s something about the way she captures each of these characters that really drove it home for me. She’s having a good time. She’s got the annoying son; she’s got the two podcasters. She’s really relishing those characters so any moments in which I might be taken out of the book, she’s dragging me back in. It’s really a master class in characterization and narration, that keeps things moving along. When I finished the book I thought, ‘Oh she’s got to solve another mystery and they’ve got to get Eunice to narrate it!’ It’s that marriage of a great text and a great narrator that I always talk about. It’s a very good example of that."