"Vera Wong's Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man)" by Jesse Sutanto

Jesse Sutanto is a successful writer educated at Oxford and California, lives in Jakarta, and has found her niche: the cozy mystery.I didn’t know what a cozy mystery was until Jesse explained it. “Nothing truly bad happens to the primary characters. For example, I couldn’t kill off Vera Wong,” she said.“Cozy mysteries have a lot of standard features,” said Richelle Braswell, a writer who explains some of the many varieties out there in her online essay, “Cozy Mystery Plots.” The stories usually involve an amateur sleuth, no explicit gore and a cute or funny sidekick, Braswell explained.Whereupon, Braswell proceeds to tick off 17 categories from academic (where the action takes place at a college or boarding school) to travel (allowing the mystery to unfold in multiple locations around the globe). In between, you have cozy categories such as culinary (exemplified by Cheese Shop mysteries by Avery Adams), historical (such as Lady Caroline Murder Mysteries by Isabella Bassett), medical (Travel Nurse Mysteries by Molly Evans), and seniors (African Violet Club Mysteries by Elise Stone that take place in an Arizona Retirement community).Sutanto’s latest entry in the cozy field is Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (On a Dead Man), a follow up to Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, published in 2023. Sutanto said the character of Vera Wong, the 60-something amateur detective, is based on her own mother known to sometimes offer outrageous comments. Sutanto, whose grandparents came from China, was born in Jakarta but grew up in Singapore. "My mother was a big influence on me. I didn’t see much of my father who worked in Jakarta at the time,” she said.Sutanto previously wrote young-adult fiction but said she switched to the mystery genre when she felt “too old” to write for teens.The author’s writing routine is to “treat it as a day job,” she said. “I allow three days to write an outline, a time when I walk about the house talking to myself about what characters would say and do,” said Sutanto.“I try to write my books in five weeks. I write 2,000 words a day—usually writing every weekday before lunch time,” said Sutanto, whose family includes husband and two small children. After completing 40,000 words, she checks into a luxury hotel alone for three nights to write 12,000 words a day. “I’ve followed this routine six or seven times,” she said.The system that produces three books a year appears to be working for Sutanto—and her cozy-mystery readers.