The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto https://amzn.to/3MIuQLD A lonely shopkeeper takes it upon herself to solve a murder in the most peculiar way in this captivating mystery by Jesse Q. Sutanto, bestselling author of Dial A for Aunties. Vera Wong is a lonely little old lady—ah, lady of a certain age—who lives above her forgotten tea shop in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Despite living alone, Vera is not needy, oh no. She likes nothing more than sipping on a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy detective work on the Internet about what her Gen-Z son is up to. Then one morning, Vera trudges downstairs to find a curious thing—a dead man in the middle of her tea shop. In his outstretched hand, a flash drive. Vera doesn’t know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? Because Vera is sure she would 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 knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer. What Vera does not expect is to form friendships with her customers and start to care for each and every one of them. As a protective mother hen, will she end up having to give one of her newfound chicks to the police? About the author Jesse Q. Sutanto is the author of adult, YA, and children's middle grade books. She has an MSt in Creative Writing from Oxford University and a BA in English Lit from Berkeley, though she hasn't found a way of saying that without sounding obnoxious. The film rights to her women’s fiction, Dial A for Aunties, was bought by Netflix in a competitive bidding war. Her adult books include Dial A for Aunties, its sequel, Four Aunties and a Wedding, and Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers. Her YA books include The Obsession, The New Girl, and Well, That Was Unexpected. Her MG books include Theo Tan and the Fox Spirit and its sequel, Theo Tan and the Iron Fan.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you have it, thechrisvossshow.com. Who knew? It's another show. Welcome to the Chris Voss Show, folks. There you have it, thechrismashow.com. Who knew? It's another show. Welcome to the Christmas Show, folks. The place where we have the family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your wife does, because you left the milk out again and you didn't put it back in the fridge.

Anyway, guys, as always, we're bringing you the most smartest minds The amazing authors People all around the world Who share their ideas, their concepts, their mindsets And improve the quality of your life And all we ask for you From the little Chris Voss show after 15 years Is please, for the love of God Or for the sake of your family or friends and relatives Go to goodreads.com

Fortress Chris Voss LinkedIn.com Fortress Chris Voss Subscribe to the big 130,000 LinkedIn group, the LinkedIn newsletter. Go to TikTok on Chris Voss 1 and Chris Voss Facebook.com. Today we have an amazing multi-book prolific author. She has written so many books. I couldn't even count them on Amazon. I don't have a calculator that goes high enough in numbers, evidently. So there you go.

We have Jessie Q. Sutanto on the show with us today. She's written a multitude of books. Her latest book came out March 14th, 2023, called Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers. So for those of you wondering how to do the murdering, she might have some advice. Don't. The attorneys made me say that. So she's going to be on the show talking to us. Jessie is the author of adult, young adult, and children's middle grade books. She has an MST in creative writing from Oxford University and a BA in English literature from Berkeley. She hasn't found a way of saying that without sounding obnoxious.

That doesn't sound obnoxious. It's quite astute. Her film rights to her women's fiction Dial A for Aunties was bought by Netflix in a competitive bidding war. Her adult books include Dial A for Aunties, its sequel, Four Aunties and a Wedding, and Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers. Her young adult books include The Obsession, of course it is, The Girl and Well, that was unexpected. Her MG books include Theo Tan and the Fox Spirit and a sequel, Theo Tan and the Iron Fan. Welcome to the show, Jessie.

How are you? Hi, I'm great. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate having you on the show as well. Give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find out more about you on the interwebs? Mostly on Instagram at jessieqsutanto and my website is jessieqsutantoauthor.com because I broke jessieqsutanto.com and I didn't know how

to fix it. There you go. There you go. So congratulations on the new book. How many books do you have, by the way, so we can get a pitch out to have people go look them all up on amazon there uh so this year i have four books out last year i had four books come out and the year before i had two books so i guess i have 10 published books there you go congratulations you're quite the prolific writer. Yeah. I guess it shows that I don't have much of a social life. Well, I mean, when you're writing, you know, you got to do the writing thing. It's a little hard to get out when you're writing and editing all the time, right? But it sounds like you're inspiring quite an audience that has built a following around you and your books from all different ages. So give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers.

So Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers is about Vera, who is a 60-year-old lady who lives on top of her tea house. And she is very lonely. Everyone seems to have kind of moved on or forgotten about her. So she's kind of lonely and depressed. And then one day she comes downstairs to her tea house and finds a dead body in the middle of it. And she decides that she is going to investigate the cause of death because nobody investigates a wrongdoing better than a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. And this is set in San Francisco's Chinatown, correct? Yes. There you go.

Yeah, those Chinese mom tiger moms, they're something else. Pretty fierce. So she finds, I guess in his hand, he has a flash drive? Yes. So in his hand, he has a flash drive. And, you know, just something comes over her and she decides to kind of, you know, swipe it before the police arrives. As any self-respecting Chinese mom would do. It's a whodunit then? A murder mystery, would you say? A sleuth? Yes. It's a cozy whodunit.

There you go. And I would say the character Vera is kind of based 80% on my mom and 20% on my dad. What's going on with your parents, eh? Advice for murderers. Well, yeah, just because they have advice for everyone, you know? Oh, I see. Okay. All right. Yeah, there you go.

So with Vera Wong, has she appeared in any of your books before? Is this a new character? No, this is a new character actually, but she feels very familiar because I've written about Chinese aunties before and she's kind of all of those aunties distilled into one character.

It's interesting how the people in our lives and our experiences make up some of the characters that a lot of authors build when they build their novels. So I guess that's the spin on the unsolicited advice for murderers uh and as she goes down the rabbit hole of solving the mystery yeah pretty much there you go so what so it sounds like you compiled some people that were in your life and your thing what made you, the topics that are in this book or the plot and everything, what made you develop this and flesh it out?

How did it come to you? So I first wrote Dial A for Aunties, which is about a young woman who accidentally kills her blind date and then has to get the help of her mom and very meddlesome aunties to help get rid of the body. And the reason why I wrote that was because my husband who is English, you know, he came to Indonesia, he met my family and he was like, you need to write about your family and i was like really they're they're so boring and he seemed normal to me trust me yeah and he was like no no no nothing about them is boring or normal um so i tried writing about my family um but every time i did

um kind of like the drama you know hit too close to home and became stressful for me. So then I thought, well, what if I threw in a dead body? And somehow doing that unlocked the creative juices and I was able to write about my family in like a really fun way. And so same thing with vera wong you know um i don't want to write just about my my mom um because that would be stressful as hell she might read the book and be like what did you say about oh yeah well she did she does read all of my books. See, that's the thing. And she really very much approves of Vera. So I was like, you know, throw in a dead body. And then suddenly it becomes totally, you know, like a really fun, lighthearted.

Wow. Can I say lighthearted when there's a dead body involved? Yeah, I don't know. It is lighthearted. But it sounds like a nice fun romp and Vera sounds like she's fun. She's a little old lady who's going to get hopefully she doesn't get herself

in any trouble, you know, with the murderers and all that good stuff, but it might be some danger from doing all that stuff. But yeah, are most of the characters in your books Chinese origin? No.

So in Vera Wong, we have a cast of five characters. So one of them is Vera, who is Chinese. And then we have Sana, who is of Indian ethnicity. We have Julia, who is Caucasian. Ricky, who is Indonesian, and we have Oliver, who is Chinese American. So it's a good mix of people, I think. There you go. It sounds like a lot of fun. Do you anticipate making more books, maybe a series using Vera? Yeah um so thankfully vera has been so uh successful that my publisher did ask for a sequel so i'm i'm so happy about that um i just finished writing the sequel

uh and i'm kind of taking a break right now um before i edit it so i never know if it's good until, you know, I actually read it. So you haven't done the final proofread on it then? On the sequel? No, I haven't even read it since finishing it. Oh, there you go. Well, it's probably good to get some time away. You know, you get a fresh perspective on it and you get back to back to reading it well it sounds like it's going to be a hit character in a series for you uh though these are always good because people love series and novels and

and mysteries and stuff they they freaking love when you have people on the show they're like in i don't know they're like 30 levels into some of their series and you know they got multiple series running through and sometimes they cross over and people eat them up they love series man they fall in love with the character and they just keep going yeah and and because it's based on my parents i just feel like i'll never run out of material, you know, because like, I really, a lot of like the things that Vera says in the book, like she's always, she has like all of this wisdom that is like very random. She's like, you know, like, don't drink cold water, because it's gonna freeze the fats in your arteries and give you heart disease and that's literally what my parents say they're like don't drink cold water you'll get a heart attack and and they'll say stuff like you know don't don't go to sleep after 9 p.m. because that's too late and you'll get brain

cancer you know it's just a lot of really random uh pieces of advice that uh i just this leads to the unsolicited advice uh did they give you any murdering advice your parents not yeah but i'm sure you know knock on wood if i ever commit murder they will have advice there you go that. That husband starts acting up, they might have some advice for you. What's that old arsenic and lace? Put some arsenic in the old coffee there. Not that I'm becoming an accessory, the lawyers just said, I have to say. So there you go.

Don't do that, folks. Don't get any ideas. I know with novels novels we can't tease out the middle and the end because you know you gotta buy the book to find out what's up there uh anything more you want to tease out about uh veer wong's unsolicited advice for murderers um i guess i would say that uh something that i found incredibly rewarding is uh how many people have messaged me to say that they really uh connected with you know this character or that character uh so julia for example um she is uh she has like a two and a half year old who is a little bit different, you know, from other toddlers.

And I kind of based that on my first kid, because when she was that age, she was such a, an oddball, you know, and as a mom, I was, I was always so concerned and people would be very well-meaning and, you know, be like, like, is she okay? You know, because she just didn't really talk to anyone and all that stuff. So it was a lot of things that I experienced, which I poured into the book and so um I'm I'm always very grateful when when readers reach out to me and say like oh I feel so sane um so it's it's been a wonderful experience well it sounds like you're on your way to a great new series and uh books that people will love because you you've been doing such a great job. And it sounds like, you know, where you're appealing to so many youth, young adults and stuff and youth, as your fan base grows up,

you're going to have one hell of a following as they follow you through all your different books you put out. Yeah, that's the whole. That's the whole point of it. So anything future you want to tease out that you're also working on top of everything else um so i i did have a uh a really dark twisted um suspense come out uh in august it's called i'm not done with you yet and it's about um yeah it's about, yeah, it's about two writers who go to Oxford University and, you know, do the master's in creative writing, like I did. So it was so fun looking back on my notes from Oxford,

because I went like, over 13 years ago, you you know and I was like oh my gosh I had forgotten about this and that and this and that anyways obviously one of them is a sociopath and becomes obsessed with the other and you know it kind of chases her down all the way to New York City where things, very bad things happen. So I'm very excited about this story. Some friends and friendships are worth killing for in this dark, twisty suspense novel by national bestselling author Jesse Sintano.

Jean isn't happy. That's always how it starts right there. Jill and Jane, John and Jane go up the hill, whatever. I don't know. There's a nursery rhyme in there somewhere. But so you pull from this and rock and roll.

Do you, do you see any more maybe coming from this book? Maybe I'm still not done with you yet as a follow-up i'll have to remember that title um you just have been messaging me asking me like if there will be a sequel uh right now i don't have any plans yet for a sequel but we you know we'll see never say never is it is a little bit like i mean i'm sure it's different but it's a little bit what was that what was that one thing of the gal who rents the other young lady you know uh white female something or other there was a movie on it and it was a

it's about two girls single white yeah yeah yeah. Is it a bit like that maybe? People keep telling me that it is, but I guess it is. Maybe just some lights on that. Yeah. Yeah. Has the Four Aunties and a Wedding come out yet? I think, was that the one that was going? No, it was Dial A for Aunties that was coming out on Netflix, wasn't it? Yeah. Yes, and Four Aunties and a Wedding came out last year, I think.

And then next year we'll have the final book in the Aunties series. There you go. I'll have to go check them out. That way I can understand your family better and get all the goods on what's going on over there. Got to go read renew that Netflix. So this should be fun. And you're putting out so much diverse stuff.

Do you ever find it hard to, you know, write about different things in different genres for different audiences? I know, actually, because so like I get into the mood of my books. So, for example, after I wrote I'm Not Done With You Yet, I was like, wow, that was really dark. You know, I really need something lighthearted and sweet and innocent now. And I think that was when I wrote uh my young adult uh rom-com and and then after i wrote that one i was like okay now i'm ready for you know like yeah so is it really nice i can't imagine that I would be a happy human being, you know, if I just wrote like dark suspense, I would probably be quite miserable.

And then I would probably feel quite stifled if I can only write like lighthearted things as well. So it's been really nice. You know, when I ended up like Stephen King, he was a good looking young man before he started writing books and look at him now. That's a mean thing to say about Stephen King. He didn't deserve that. So there you go.

Did you always want to be a writer when you're growing up? So I was aggressively mediocre as a student. And after I graduated with my bachelor's, I was like, oh, God, what are we going to do with an English lit degree? And then I was like, OK, well, I'll try my hand at this writing thing. So I went and got a master's in it. And after I graduated with a master's, I was like, okay, I have a master's from Oxford, you know? So I am awesome.

And publishers are going to be knocking down my door, begging for my manuscript. And that did not happen. So it took another like 10 years before I got my publishing deal. And during that time I did a few different jobs. I was wedding photographer, which yeah, I really liked, but it was really, really stressful as well. But it was useful too, because you'll find that a lot of my characters are photographers. Just because I know what I'm talking about,

you know, when I talk about photography. And then I worked in my family company. So my family's in real estate and I was terrible at it. Finally, when I was able to quit, thanks to my writing, you know, my cousins were like, oh, thank God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You know, like, you know, congratulations.

And I'm so happy for you. We only had you on because of nepotism. And I was like, I know. Oh, wow. Leave those people out of your will for your book proceeds. Your book royalties. Just cut them out. Just be like, I remember you people were, yeah, just cut them out of the will.

So there you go. Well, it's been fun to have you on and super insightful. Give us your final thoughts and pitch out on the books as we go out to people to pick them up. Well, so excitingly, Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

has been picked up by Warner Brothers with Oprah and Mindy Kaling attached to produce. So, you know, yeah. So I feel like Oprah and Mindy Kaling have really good taste. So please trust them and pick up the book.

There you go. Order the book, folks, wherever fine books are sold. It's been fun to have you on. Thank you very much jesse thank you so much for having me this was so fun there you go and folks order the books wherever fine books are sold vera wong's unsolicited advice for murderers doing the murdering and uh i'm not done with you yet boy what a chilling title that is that kind of just sends a chill down my spine

just saying it. I'm not done with you. Who wants to hear that in a dark alley or something? I don't know. You wake up and you're like, why am I in this bag? And they're like, I'm not done with you yet. It's like, this is, I shouldn't have I shouldn't have drank

that whatever. I don't know what the plot of the thing is. But it is makeup stuff. So thank you very much for coming on the show. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss, chrisfoss1 on the tickety-tockety, and chrisfossfacebook.com and all the great things we do on social media. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out.