Aunty Lee's Chilled Revenge: A Singaporean Mystery by Ovidia Yu

Aunty Lee's restaurant is doing a good business.  She has lots of repeat customers, a few employees, and she enjoys feeding people.  If only she hadn't sprained her foot falling off a ladder.  Soon, she has more than that to worry about.  A luncheon meeting at her restaurant looks like it's going to be a bit tense, so she joins the party to find out what's going on.  While they wait for the person meeting with them, someone kills her.  Who cares about an ankle now?

William Morrow Paperbacks and Edelweiss gave me the opportunity to read this book for review (thank you).  It will be published April 5th.

Aunty Lee takes the dead woman's sister into her house since she has a guest room and the sister doesn't want to go back to the hotel.  She senses something is off about the sister but she also knows she's suffered a shock.  Her solution is to feed her.  After all, food is soothing, calms people down, and sometimes they chat better after eating.

There is a lot of food mentioned in this book and I've never tasted most of it.  This is not American Chinese food.  They eat things hot and cold, lots of spice or not, and some is even jelled.  It sounds like quite an adventure to eat at her restaurant.

The characters involved all are all friends of Aunty Lee and she can't imagine one of them would murder a virtual stranger.  This mystery is twisted and has hints of psychopath in a couple of characters.  The one I thought was the murderer was not, one I didn't initially suspect popped up as the guilty party.  I appreciate an author who can keep me guessing.