Call number
MYST PEK
Collections
Publication
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (2022), 368 pages
Description
Introducing Claudia Lin: a sharp-witted amateur sleuth for the 21st century. This debut novel follows Claudia as she verifies people's online lives, and lies, for a dating detective agency in New York City. Until a client with an unusual request goes missing. . . . "The world of social media, big tech and internet connectivity provides fertile new ground for humans to deceive, defraud and possibly murder one another. . . . Well rendered and charming. . . . Original and intriguing." --The New York Times Book Review 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. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member eyes.2c
Fun and sparkling read!
Edgy contemporary mystery that took me into the bewildering world of match making apps, compatibility algorithms, and the idea of how much information is actually out there about us. As a result of the latter I felt like closing every social media app I use, going off grid
It seems the problem with the dating apps is that all participants either stretch the truth or downright lie. That means matchings are skewed. Let me not get into the training of the bots associated with the process. Veracity is a company that will triage your date and tell you what’s what—generally after you’ve been taken for a ride. Claudia Lin can’t believe she’s landed a job with this techno edgy company. BTW her family thinks she’s still working at a financial institution. I love Claudia’s description to her friends about what Veracity does, “ “It’s really a big Sorting Hat,” I say, “that matches people up based on which Hogwarts house they belong to.” That’s in fact the premise of two boutique matchmakers I’ve come across.”
Love that! Harry Potter references sizing up the world of internet dating. Ha!
Enter client Iris Lettriste who wants a potential date checked. There’s some implausibilities and she wants to know if her match is the real deal or a jerk. Pre-verifying a date is rather unusual. But still the firm takes her on as a client. When Iris is found dead things become even more complicated, especially for Claudia.
Channeling Inspector Yuan, her fictional Chinese murder hero, Claudia decides to power on to discover all that she can. Well she was doing that prior to the demise of Iris anyway. Veracity is not a detective agency. Claudia has her doubts as she gets caught up in the moment, her Yuan personae taking charge constantly.
Witty and entertaining, I was grabbed by the hilarity of Claudia and her continual inner observations, her relationship with her family, and her almost slapstick detecting abilities.
Thank you to Penguin Random House for their invitation to look at this ARC via NetGalley
Please note: Quotes taken from an advanced reading copy maybe subject to change
Edgy contemporary mystery that took me into the bewildering world of match making apps, compatibility algorithms, and the idea of how much information is actually out there about us. As a result of the latter I felt like closing every social media app I use, going off grid
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and heading for the hills.It seems the problem with the dating apps is that all participants either stretch the truth or downright lie. That means matchings are skewed. Let me not get into the training of the bots associated with the process. Veracity is a company that will triage your date and tell you what’s what—generally after you’ve been taken for a ride. Claudia Lin can’t believe she’s landed a job with this techno edgy company. BTW her family thinks she’s still working at a financial institution. I love Claudia’s description to her friends about what Veracity does, “ “It’s really a big Sorting Hat,” I say, “that matches people up based on which Hogwarts house they belong to.” That’s in fact the premise of two boutique matchmakers I’ve come across.”
Love that! Harry Potter references sizing up the world of internet dating. Ha!
Enter client Iris Lettriste who wants a potential date checked. There’s some implausibilities and she wants to know if her match is the real deal or a jerk. Pre-verifying a date is rather unusual. But still the firm takes her on as a client. When Iris is found dead things become even more complicated, especially for Claudia.
Channeling Inspector Yuan, her fictional Chinese murder hero, Claudia decides to power on to discover all that she can. Well she was doing that prior to the demise of Iris anyway. Veracity is not a detective agency. Claudia has her doubts as she gets caught up in the moment, her Yuan personae taking charge constantly.
Witty and entertaining, I was grabbed by the hilarity of Claudia and her continual inner observations, her relationship with her family, and her almost slapstick detecting abilities.
Thank you to Penguin Random House for their invitation to look at this ARC via NetGalley
Please note: Quotes taken from an advanced reading copy maybe subject to change
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LibraryThing member Narshkite
I cannot express how much I loved this litfic mystery. I wanted something wryly funny, smart but not tragic, and in line with my actual life, and this was perfect. Pek is a lawyer in tech in NYC (she is in venture capital and I am on the academic side, but the tech community here is tight and these
This is a mystery, set up much like a Sherlock Holmes/Charlie Chan mashup. Claudia is a huge reader, and was raised on a series of Chinese mysteries that become her bible as she launches a career in detective work (which her company insists is not detective work.) Essentially they use technology and old fashioned on the street sleuthing to investigate people their clients have met on one of the many matching sites. For the record, she totally gets right how matching services work -- like those DNA vendors they seduce people into offering up their most personal data which is worth a mint to people selling stuff. Claudia is a smart and funny Chinese-American lesbian with a liberal arts education, a love of books and cycling and romance (and an outsize fear of romance in her real life) and a deeply fascinating and dysfunctional family. I loved every member of the family, and the story built around them (her siblings both play a part in solving the central mystery though neither of them know it) is just a blast.
I don't want to spoil anything but the core mystery comes up when a client of Claudia's firm turns up dead, ostensibly by suicide. To Claudia, who had read lot's of books in a series about a Chinese detective, all sorts of signs point to foul play. The mystery is a good one, but it is not the most important thing happening in this book by a longshot. The reason for the action hinges on a very real question for those in tech policy. If we make it possible to predict what people want through technology, how do we stop Tech from telling people what they want. Yep, I buy what Amazon recommends based on my Google searches and Amazon and GooglePay buying patterns - because I understand how my data is traced and sold I won't use online dating or Ancestry type sites or even Alexa or Siri, but if I did that data would be used too. The stakes of this are much higher though than picking which headphones to buy. Again, Pek actually understands these issues and it makes this story hum. (I found Klara & the Sun very problematic because it was clear Ishiguro totally did not understand how AI works and what the real problems are. This was not a problem here. I love when writers actually do a little research.)
I really really hope this is the first in a series. I want to hang out with Claudia's sister, brother and mother. I want to find out if Claudia's love of romance overcomes her fear and skepticism (that is of particular interest -- I would like to see how one makes that happen). I want to spend more time with Becks and Squirrel, I can't say more about them without spoiling either. Mostly I want to spend more time with Claudia. She is a never-ending delight.
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are my people) and she does an amazing job. I often have a problem with texts that deal with AI and with law because they are usually unbelievably poorly researched and flat our wrong. This is not wrong. The central issue is something we work on at my institution (from a policy perspective) and Pek fully gets it. And the lawyer life is well sketched out (though it is not central at all-the lawyer is just a side character.) One of the pivotal scenes is at a reception for women and underrepresented groups in tech, and she freaking nailed that setting. It is genius. She also gets NYC right, from the perspective of someone who lives here. Our detective, Claudia, is a cyclist (a particularly hearty and fearless breed of New Yorker) and she sees the city as she rolls through it, and its ugly and beautiful and merciless and merciful and rude and friendly in equal measure. I loved that she had a meeting at the Calder retrospective at MoMA (which closed a month ago and which I went to perhaps 20 times) which really set the moment in time perfectly for me.This is a mystery, set up much like a Sherlock Holmes/Charlie Chan mashup. Claudia is a huge reader, and was raised on a series of Chinese mysteries that become her bible as she launches a career in detective work (which her company insists is not detective work.) Essentially they use technology and old fashioned on the street sleuthing to investigate people their clients have met on one of the many matching sites. For the record, she totally gets right how matching services work -- like those DNA vendors they seduce people into offering up their most personal data which is worth a mint to people selling stuff. Claudia is a smart and funny Chinese-American lesbian with a liberal arts education, a love of books and cycling and romance (and an outsize fear of romance in her real life) and a deeply fascinating and dysfunctional family. I loved every member of the family, and the story built around them (her siblings both play a part in solving the central mystery though neither of them know it) is just a blast.
I don't want to spoil anything but the core mystery comes up when a client of Claudia's firm turns up dead, ostensibly by suicide. To Claudia, who had read lot's of books in a series about a Chinese detective, all sorts of signs point to foul play. The mystery is a good one, but it is not the most important thing happening in this book by a longshot. The reason for the action hinges on a very real question for those in tech policy. If we make it possible to predict what people want through technology, how do we stop Tech from telling people what they want. Yep, I buy what Amazon recommends based on my Google searches and Amazon and GooglePay buying patterns - because I understand how my data is traced and sold I won't use online dating or Ancestry type sites or even Alexa or Siri, but if I did that data would be used too. The stakes of this are much higher though than picking which headphones to buy. Again, Pek actually understands these issues and it makes this story hum. (I found Klara & the Sun very problematic because it was clear Ishiguro totally did not understand how AI works and what the real problems are. This was not a problem here. I love when writers actually do a little research.)
I really really hope this is the first in a series. I want to hang out with Claudia's sister, brother and mother. I want to find out if Claudia's love of romance overcomes her fear and skepticism (that is of particular interest -- I would like to see how one makes that happen). I want to spend more time with Becks and Squirrel, I can't say more about them without spoiling either. Mostly I want to spend more time with Claudia. She is a never-ending delight.
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LibraryThing member EdGoldberg
Claudia Lin abruptly quit the finance job her over-achieving brother got for her and joined the 3-person firm Veracity. Veracity helps the lovelorn verify that the potential matches they’re chatting with or meeting through their online dating apps are who they say they are. Claudia, being the new
In walks Iris Lettriste who wants Veracity to investigate a man she’s chatted with whose online name is Charretter. It seems he’s reluctant to meet her in person. Soon after, she wants a second investigation, this time for Captain Bubbles, a man she has met but who seems to be hiding something.
As one reviewer described it, “…Claudia’s investigations come to a screeching halt, however, when Iris not only turns up dead but turns out not to be who she claimed she was at all.” Iris, in fact, is Sarah Reaves impersonating her sister, Iris Lettriste. And her death is ruled a suicide from an overdose of the migraine medicine Sarah was taking. According to the real Iris, Sarah was troubled from a recent breakup and a stalled career as a journalist.
Whether it’s intuition or the influence of the Inspector Yuan of the Middle Ages mystery novels Claudia consumes constantly, Claudia thinks there’s more to Sarah’s death than meets the eye; in fact she thinks Sarah was murdered. However, she has not evidence nor motives and neither of her bosses, Komla Atsina, a Ghanaian tech wizard or his partner, Becks Rittle, aka the Blonde Assassin because of her caustic nature, agree with her. So, Claudia must go it alone, imagining she herself is in an Inspector Yuan mystery, and possibly putting the kabosh on her budding career at Veracity.
As she investigates, she finds many interesting things including the real Iris’s assertions that her sister was depressed and her journalism career was lackluster are false. All this causes Claudia to look deeper into Sarah’s death and possibly put her own life in danger.
There are so many things to like about this book. While one reviewer tired of the references to the Inspector Yuan stories, I enjoyed them. It made me wish they were real stories. Claudia, the apple of her mother’s eye, must still compete with her overachieving brother and her drop-dead gorgeous (excuse the pun) sister…yes, your typical dysfunctional family dynamics. Claudia’s interaction with and musing about her bosses, especially Becks who she has a crush on, are fresh and enjoyable.
Embedded in the mystery and familial and workplace interactions are the issues of technology, whether it’s good or bad, whether it controls what you do as it obtains more information about us or provides you with more freedom of choice.
A hallmark of a cozy mystery is the amateur sleuth, and Claudia fits the bill. However, as several reviewers mentioned, The Verifiers could be considered a cozy, closed door mystery brought forward to the 21st century.
One reviewer said The Verifiers is “cool, cerebral and very funny…beautifully complemented by entertaining secondary characters…”
Ms. Pek said the idea germinated from a BBC Radio segment about wedding detectives in India who are hired when a couple gets engaged to check up on the prospective bride or groom.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say The Verifiers should be up for an Edgar Award. I look forward to a continuation of this series.
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kid on the block, is stuck preparing spreadsheets, slogging through online chat sessions and following subjects all over Manhattan, typically on her bicycle. Yet, all this is more exciting than sitting behind a finance office desk all day.In walks Iris Lettriste who wants Veracity to investigate a man she’s chatted with whose online name is Charretter. It seems he’s reluctant to meet her in person. Soon after, she wants a second investigation, this time for Captain Bubbles, a man she has met but who seems to be hiding something.
As one reviewer described it, “…Claudia’s investigations come to a screeching halt, however, when Iris not only turns up dead but turns out not to be who she claimed she was at all.” Iris, in fact, is Sarah Reaves impersonating her sister, Iris Lettriste. And her death is ruled a suicide from an overdose of the migraine medicine Sarah was taking. According to the real Iris, Sarah was troubled from a recent breakup and a stalled career as a journalist.
Whether it’s intuition or the influence of the Inspector Yuan of the Middle Ages mystery novels Claudia consumes constantly, Claudia thinks there’s more to Sarah’s death than meets the eye; in fact she thinks Sarah was murdered. However, she has not evidence nor motives and neither of her bosses, Komla Atsina, a Ghanaian tech wizard or his partner, Becks Rittle, aka the Blonde Assassin because of her caustic nature, agree with her. So, Claudia must go it alone, imagining she herself is in an Inspector Yuan mystery, and possibly putting the kabosh on her budding career at Veracity.
As she investigates, she finds many interesting things including the real Iris’s assertions that her sister was depressed and her journalism career was lackluster are false. All this causes Claudia to look deeper into Sarah’s death and possibly put her own life in danger.
There are so many things to like about this book. While one reviewer tired of the references to the Inspector Yuan stories, I enjoyed them. It made me wish they were real stories. Claudia, the apple of her mother’s eye, must still compete with her overachieving brother and her drop-dead gorgeous (excuse the pun) sister…yes, your typical dysfunctional family dynamics. Claudia’s interaction with and musing about her bosses, especially Becks who she has a crush on, are fresh and enjoyable.
Embedded in the mystery and familial and workplace interactions are the issues of technology, whether it’s good or bad, whether it controls what you do as it obtains more information about us or provides you with more freedom of choice.
A hallmark of a cozy mystery is the amateur sleuth, and Claudia fits the bill. However, as several reviewers mentioned, The Verifiers could be considered a cozy, closed door mystery brought forward to the 21st century.
One reviewer said The Verifiers is “cool, cerebral and very funny…beautifully complemented by entertaining secondary characters…”
Ms. Pek said the idea germinated from a BBC Radio segment about wedding detectives in India who are hired when a couple gets engaged to check up on the prospective bride or groom.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say The Verifiers should be up for an Edgar Award. I look forward to a continuation of this series.
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LibraryThing member bfister
What a strange, but intriguing book. A young woman goes to work for a secretive firm that investigates online dating relationships. But only under tightly-controlled rules, which gets the young woman in trouble when she grows too determined to detect on behalf of a murdered client (who was,
It's not the most suspenseful narrative, but it's original and asks some interesting questions about self-representation, online relationships, and the ways these systems are kept in a black box.
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apparently, a struggling writer investigating dating services using her sister's identity). Our heroine is a mystery fan, and she can't resist seeing her life as a story. It's not the most suspenseful narrative, but it's original and asks some interesting questions about self-representation, online relationships, and the ways these systems are kept in a black box.
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LibraryThing member Hccpsk
With The Verifiers, debut author Jane Pek tries to combine an old-fashioned mystery with an immigrant family drama, and commentary on technology — she is mostly successful in my opinion. Slacker-ish twenty-something Claudia Lin has just landed a new job at Veracity, a firm that investigates
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possible matches in the online dating industry for people who think their match is lying to them. She finally feels somewhat successful compared to her over-achieving brother and sister in the eyes of her critical mother, but the job soon balloons into more than she bargained for. Diehard mystery readers will not enjoy the social justice and family turmoil, but I think Pek combines the two genres well for those of us who don’t need just a hardcore plotline. At times the writing is funny and easy, but Pek gets bogged down in too many details, and has a weird penchant for sliding from actual dialogue into a distracting third-person telling within a conversation. That being said, The Verifiers remains a very readable book with timely topics and a compelling plot. Show Less
LibraryThing member froxgirl
Take off one star if you can't handle tech and the word "algorithm" strikes fear in your heart. But for everyone else, this is a delightful mystery that's worthy of a sequel and more. Unlike her short stories, which are filled with allegories and ancient tales, this is a straightforward mystery
Quotes: "It rains all day, the kind of steady, soaking rain that gives the city the air of a crumbling cardboard diorama."
"The humans misremembered and miscast events, they changed their minds and believed they had always held these opinions, they acted in ways contrary to their best interests, they had conflicting desires, they didn't know what they wanted at all."
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about Claudia, a Chinese woman who's floundering, unlike her successful brother and sister, until she takes a job with Veracity, a company that assists people on dating sites to investigate their matches. Claudia's role model is Inspector Yuan, the genius from a series of detective novels, and when one of Veracity's clients is murdered, she vies to follow in his footsteps, despite resistance from her two bosses. There's also an abundance of family conflict and a ton of humor.Quotes: "It rains all day, the kind of steady, soaking rain that gives the city the air of a crumbling cardboard diorama."
"The humans misremembered and miscast events, they changed their minds and believed they had always held these opinions, they acted in ways contrary to their best interests, they had conflicting desires, they didn't know what they wanted at all."
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LibraryThing member bragan
Claudia Lin has just gotten a job at a company that does detective work, of a sort, for people who want to check on whether their online dating matches actually are who they say they are. But when an especially unusual client turns up dead, supposedly of suicide, and also not to have been exactly
I found much of this one enjoyable. The writing is breezy and fun. Claudia's a likeable character, and her family feel very real. And the online dating angle to things is fairly interesting and seems to be ready to deal with important themes involving privacy and the role that corporations play even in the most intimate parts of our lives. Where it goes with those themes doesn't turn out to be terribly satisfying, though, and in the end neither does the plot. The solution to the mystery turns out to be about half obvious from the beginning and half ridiculously implausible, and the ending, which seems to maybe be trying to leave things open for a sequel, mostly just fizzles out.
Rating: I found enough of this entertaining enough to give it a 3.5/5, but I'm still annoyed that it doesn't stick the landing well enough to be the 4-star read it initially seemed like it was going to be.
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who she claimed to be, Claudia takes it on herself to channel the detectives from the mystery novels she loves and investigate, while also dealing with her own (lack of) love life and her extremely difficult family.I found much of this one enjoyable. The writing is breezy and fun. Claudia's a likeable character, and her family feel very real. And the online dating angle to things is fairly interesting and seems to be ready to deal with important themes involving privacy and the role that corporations play even in the most intimate parts of our lives. Where it goes with those themes doesn't turn out to be terribly satisfying, though, and in the end neither does the plot. The solution to the mystery turns out to be about half obvious from the beginning and half ridiculously implausible, and the ending, which seems to maybe be trying to leave things open for a sequel, mostly just fizzles out.
Rating: I found enough of this entertaining enough to give it a 3.5/5, but I'm still annoyed that it doesn't stick the landing well enough to be the 4-star read it initially seemed like it was going to be.
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LibraryThing member Aronfish
This book worked on so many levels. It dives into the world of internet dating and the lies or truths that people present to the world in their profiles, through the company that our heroine works at-- which assists clients who want to "verify" the profiles of the people they are dating online..
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There is also a mystery related to the death of a client that kept me guessing satisfactorily. But my favorite part of the book dealt with the relationships of siblings, particularly those who grew up in a household where one or more more sibs felt the favoritism or lack thereof from a parent. I really enjoyed it. Show Less
LibraryThing member Anniik
This book simply did not go together well for me. The story of a Chinese-American girl in Nee York City who decides to go all detective on a case from her work, this book tries to tell at least two stories at once. There’s the mystery - which gets more and more complex and confusing as time goes
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on - and the story of Claudia’s personal life, which is never really resolved in any real sense. Tie those two things to the fact that I was literally yelling at her to stop doing obvious stupid things as I read, and you have a book that I could definitely have done without. Show Less
LibraryThing member rmarcin
Claudia Lin is the youngest in her family - and her mother's favorite, which is a source of contention between her and her siblings, Charles and Coraline. Claudia also loves reading murder mysteries and it is humorous as to how she incorporates the mysteries into real-life. She is constantly
Claudia works for a small firm, Veracity, and one of the clients asks them to investigate why their matches have ghosted them. When a client then ends up dead, Claudia decides to investigate on her own. What she discovers is an interesting look into dating sites that perform matches based on algorithms and how they are manipulated.
Claudia is an interesting heroine, and I believe this may be the beginning of a series.
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thinking about how one of her mystery novels would handle a situation. Claudia works for a small firm, Veracity, and one of the clients asks them to investigate why their matches have ghosted them. When a client then ends up dead, Claudia decides to investigate on her own. What she discovers is an interesting look into dating sites that perform matches based on algorithms and how they are manipulated.
Claudia is an interesting heroine, and I believe this may be the beginning of a series.
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LibraryThing member bookappeal
Funny, with a complex (sometimes confusing) plot and an engaging lead character. Raises issues surrounding the use of technology to gather information on people and use it in new ways. The main appeal of this story is quirky Claudia Lin as she navigates her dysfunctional family and
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ethically-questionable job. Show Less
LibraryThing member Gena678
I loved the idea of a detective agency that investigates dating profiles! The main character was well written and I loved her complicated relationships with her family and her inspiration from Chinese mystery novels. I would read more of this if the author continues writing in this world.
LibraryThing member MiserableFlower
I enjoyed the character and the voice of the novel... but ultimately this feels like nothing was really finished? I don't really enjoy the fact that justice wasn't served.... with the second book that will be coming out sometime in the future, I would pick it up just to see if everything is
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balanced out in the next book and this was just a funky cliff hanger. Show Less
LibraryThing member RickGeissal
This is a mystery with lots of twists, a story with several interesting characters and some significant insights into immigrant Taiwanese family dynamics. I could hardly put it down!
Awards
Macavity Award (Nominee — 2023)
Publishing Triangle Awards (Finalist — Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ Crime Writing — 2023)
RUSA CODES Reading List (Shortlist — Mystery — 2023)
Lefty Award (Nominee — 2023)
NPR: Books We Love (2022)
LibraryReads (Monthly Pick — February 2022)
Pages
368
ISBN
0593313798 / 9780593313794