VERA WONG'S GUIDE TO SNOOPING (ON A DEAD MAN)

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.