The Verifiers
by Jane Pek
Claudia Lin, a 25-year old Chinese-American New Yorker, is eager to please at her new job. She is working for Veracity, an agency hired by rich clients to verify whether their online dating partners are lying. Then one of those clients is found dead. The police consider it a suicide, but Claudia believes it’s murder. Though her bosses say she should drop it, she secretly begins to explore the case.
As a petite and soft-spoken Asian female, Claudia finds she is often overlooked, and turns this near-invisibility to her advantage. Though she has no training as a detective, she is an avid reader of classic mysteries, and when in doubt she draws on investigative rules she intuits from her favourite series featuring a fictional Inspector Yuan.
The writing is tight and often funny. Claudia is a delightful character, whose determination to live life on her own terms often puts her at odds with the expectations of her first-generation-immigrant mother and her more successful older siblings, to say nothing of instructions from her bosses. She’s prone to impulsive decisions that get her into further trouble, but sometimes prove successful.
Other characters in the novel — Claudia’s bosses and clients, as well as her family — are equally quirky and individual, with characteristics that drive the plot along.
The novel extrapolates from a number of current real-life trends, with online dating companies that use algorithms and vast data sources to offer “perfect matches” to their clients. The only weakness they have is an inability to know if clients are lying. That is where Veracity comes in. The agency’s existence is secret, with clients finding them only by word of mouth. And clients may have secret agendas of their own.
The Verifiers, published in February 2022, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an Indie Next and LibraryReads pick, a Good Morning America recommendation, and a Phenomenal Book Club selection.
Jane Pek was born and grew up in Singapore, then came to the US for college. She holds a BA from Yale, a law degree from New York University, and an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College. She has had several pieces of short fiction published, and two of her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories.
She and her wife live in New York City. She works as a lawyer at a global investment company, as well as writing fiction. She is currently working on The Rivals, a sequel to The Verifiers.
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