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My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Dial A for Aunties is an absurdist murder mystery with some romance sprinkled in by Jesse Q. Sutanto. The eBook version is 320 pages and is told in the first person both in present day and in various flashbacks. I listened to the audiobook, which clocks in at almost ten and a half hours and is narrated by Risa Mei.
Our POV character and heroine is Meddelin Chan. There is a curse in her Chinese-Indonesian family where all of the men leave, including her male cousins (most of them are on the East coast, with her mother and aunties in California). The whole family runs a wedding business, with the oldest aunt doing the cakes, Meddy’s mother as the florist, fourth aunt as the singing entertainment, and Meddelin as the photographer.
Just before a big wedding event, Meddy’s mother pretends to be her daughter on an online dating app, and sets her up for a blind (to her) date. But said date is really a creep who ends up dead after an accident. Meddy asks her mother for help, and much to her chagrin her mother calls in the aunties. So they have to band together to figure out what to do with a dead body. And then Meddy runs into her college boyfriend (aka the love of her life) because he owns the hotel where the wedding is being held.
If you’re a fan of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series, you may like this one too! If you’re someone who can’t suspend disbelief, this may not be the book for you. If this ever becomes a tv series or movie, I need Matt Frewer, the actor who played Taggert on Eureka, to play the sheriff.
CW: death, murder, dead bodies, attempted sexual assault, casual racism, alcohol abuse, drug use, car accident, kidnapping
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