finished reading

This cozy mystery surprised me because the main character is depicted as an old woman--but Vera's 60.  My age.  And I hardly describe myself as old.  Realizing that she's my age skews the book--when I thought she was a sprightly octogenarian, I was all in.  Anyhow...

The premise is that Vera Wong is a meddlesome old woman who discovers a dead man in her tea shop and decides she can solve the mystery more satisfactorily than the police can.  She uses traditional, conventional wisdom and a "what would Agatha Christie do" mentality and sets to work.  The book is less about the murder and more about how the suspects band together, and how Vera susses out the culprit--all the while doling out meddlesome advice.

From the publisher:

Put the kettle on, there’s a mystery brewing…

Tea-shop owner. Matchmaker. Detective?

Sixty-year-old self-proclaimed tea expert Vera Wong enjoys nothing more than sipping a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy ‘detective’ work on the internet (AKA checking up on her son to see if he’s dating anybody yet).

But when Vera wakes up one morning to find a dead man in the middle of her tea shop, it’s going to take more than a strong Longjing to fix things. Knowing she’ll do a better job than the police possibly could – because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands – Vera decides it’s down to her to catch the killer.

Nobody spills the tea like this amateur sleuth.