Dial A for Aunties

Dial A for Aunties is a fast, funny crime-romance caper about Meddelin Chan, a Chinese-Indonesian American wedding photographer trapped between family duty, romantic regret, and one very inconvenient corpse. When her mother catfishes a man into a date on Meddy’s behalf, the night turns dangerous, and Meddy’s desperate self-defense spirals into a cover-up involving her mother and three aunties.

The chaos follows them to an ultra-luxury island wedding, where the body keeps moving, secrets keep multiplying, and Meddy’s long-lost college love, Nathan, turns out to be the hotel owner. Between stolen tea ceremony gifts, drunk groomsmen, a suspicious sheriff, and family rivalries, Meddy must solve the mess she helped create—and finally decide whether family love has to mean giving up her own life.

• Listeners who love crime capers with romantic-comedy energy and nonstop complications.
• Readers drawn to big, chaotic immigrant families, auntie humor, and fierce intergenerational love.
• Anyone who enjoys wedding disasters, second-chance romance, and mystery plots that stay playful instead of grim.

Jesse Q. Sutanto grew up between Indonesia, Singapore, and Oxford, and often writes about family, identity, and culture with sharp humor. She has a master’s degree from Oxford University and comes from a large Chinese-Indonesian family, an influence that strongly shapes the warmth and chaos of Dial A for Aunties.