The Verifiers

Jane Pek’s The Verifiers is so many books bundled together in one—office novel, family drama, literary thriller, mystery, romance—and like no reading experience I’ve had before. What begins as a book about the eerie technological intrusions into the dating world transforms into a murder mystery that kept me flipping eagerly through the pages.

Claudia Lin verifies identities for a living. Remember that person you dated who seemed a little too good to be true? Well, maybe they were—and Claudia’s the person who uncovers the truth. But when one of her clients, Iris Lettrise, dies unexpectedly, Claudia can’t leave the mystery of her death alone. Like you and me, she’s a huge reader, carrying in her head an encyclopedic knowledge of the Inspector Yuan mystery novels. Claudia relies on schemes lifted from these novels, often to her detriment, as the case stretches far beyond what she ever could have expected. Everyone in her life wants her to give up on the case. But she can’t.

As Claudia falls deeper into the mystery of Iris’s death—and the mystery of who Iris actually was—she risks losing her career and her friends and the life her mother envisioned for her all to learn the truth about the woman she barely knows and accept the truth about herself. Were her sacrifices worth it? You’ll have to add this book to your box to verify.

Introducing a sharp-witted heroine for the 21st century: a new amateur sleuth exploring the landscape—both physical and virtual—of New York in a debut novel about love, technology, and murder.

Claudia Lin is used to disregarding her fractious family’s model-minority expectations: she has no interest in finding either a conventional career or a nice Chinese boy. She’s also used to keeping secrets from them, such as that she prefers girls—and that she's just been stealth-recruited by Veracity, a referrals-only online-dating detective agency.

A lifelong mystery reader who wrote her senior thesis on Jane Austen, Claudia believes she’s landed her ideal job. But when a client goes missing, Claudia breaks protocol to investigate—and uncovers a maelstrom of personal and corporate deceit. Part literary mystery, part family story, The Verifiers is a clever and incisive examination of how technology shapes our choices, and the nature of romantic love in the digital age.