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AUNTY LEE'S DELIGHTS
by Ovidia Yu
William Morrow, September 2013
288 pages
$14.99
ISBN: 0062227157


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Rosie Lee is a widow with means who enjoys serving up healthy and sustaining food to her relatives and friends. At a meal hosted to promote her stepson's latest business venture, the macabre discovery is generating plenty of gossip. The company includes Mark, the stepson, his bitchy wife Selina, and Harry Sullivan and the Cunninghams, both visiting from Australia.

Selina receives a text revealing that two people will not be joining as expected: Laura and Marianne. This petty annoyance becomes something more worrying when a woman named Carla Saito arrives, looking for the missing girls, but refusing to say more. Rosie is concerned enough to report Laura's disappearance to the police, and when Senior Staff Sergeant Salim appears in person to question her, she jumps to the correct conclusion - it was indeed Laura who has been murdered.

A further death follows, as well as an explosion which puts people in hospital, and notwithstanding Aunty Lee's age, she immediately springs into action, proffering food to those in need of sustenance and advice to the police. Aided only by her Filipina maid Nina, Rosie brings her powers of observation and knowledge of human nature to bear, and soon identifies the culprit.

Yu is well-known in her native Singapore and is obviously an enthusiast for the place, and for local cooking. The book is larded with local terms for foodstuffs and character traits, but unfortunately these are not translated and mean little to a Westerner. The characters are from several races, in keeping with local circumstances, but this is not always revealed at the outset. So it is fairly disconcerting when it turns out fairly late in the piece (for example) that Marianne Peters is of Indian extraction, calling for readjustment to the picture the reader has formed of the character.

In a meet-the-author section at the end if the book Yu reveals her love of Agatha Christie, and the central player in the drama does have a few touches of Miss Marple about her. One such is her willingness to instruct the police about their business, and their enthusiasm for listening to her. This is all very fanciful, of course, but Christie's continuing success even now seems to suggest that there is an appetite for this sort of thing.

If there is one serious issue raised in the book, it is the attitude toward homosexuality, where Singapore lags the West in outlook by about thirty years. Other than that, the less sunny side of Singapore is not too evident, apart from the number of formidable Chinese matrons with a marked tendency to intimidate harmless citizens going about their daily business.

§ Chris Roberts is a retired manager of shopping centres in Hong Kong, and now lives in Bristol, primarily reading.

Reviewed by Chris Roberts, November 2014

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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