The Verifiers

The Verifiers was one of the Washington Post's best mystery books for 2022. This debut novel follows amateur sleuth Claudia Lin as she verifies people's online lives, and lies, for a dating detective agency in New York City. 

The publisher's summary:  

Claudia 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 vanishes, 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.

I love Claudia's method of investigation. Claudia is inspired by her favorite amateur sleuths and thinks back to the steps they followed in their own investigations. Likewise, when Claudia becomes stumped she thinks about the villains she has read about and how they committed murder. She particularly loves the 'Inspector Yuan' mystery series. The second book in the series, The Rivals, follows these strategies so I expect that future books will continue in this vein. 

The story opens with Claudia meeting a new client, Sarah Reaves, who has the feeling her latest match may not the wonderful guy that she thinks he is. Claudia's company, Veracity, is a business that performs investigations, both electronic and in-person, for those customers using match-making apps but who are having some doubts about their matches. They are able to access the databases of several dating apps. Claudia determines that Sarah's match, Jude Kalman, has been chatting with three other women. She decides to stake out his home but never finds him coming or going. A week or so later, Sarah's sister Iris visits the Veracity offices to request an investigation into her match. She does not mention that Sarah killed herself. Claudia believes that these are not suicidal deaths but murder and, after being told to close this file, she continues to investigate. 

Author Jane Pek was born and grew up in Singapore. She holds a BA from Yale University, a JD from the New York University School of Law, and an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. She currently lives in New York, where she works as a lawyer at a global investment company.

This book was a fun read. I am rating it 4 out of 5 stars.