Jane Pek's The Verifiers imagines a not-too-distant future in which romance is housed entirely within the world of online matchmaking sites, promising perfect matches in exchange for the inexpensive price of telling big tech companies every little detail about oneself. It's not a system Claudia Lin subscribes to--but her disinterest in matchmaking makes her a perfect verifier, working for a kind of "dating detective agency" that helps clients figure out whether their matches have been completely truthful--which, usually, they have not. "People lie.... This means dating algorithms are predicting compatibility on the basis of faulty data and exposing users to potential deception by their matches. Enter the verifiers."
Claudia fancies herself something of a modern-day spy or 21st-century sleuth, "being paid to investigate romantic mysteries like some latter-day love child of Jane Austen and Sherlock Holmes." But when a client comes to her team with a stranger-than-fiction case, she gets caught up in an increasingly complicated--and potentially dangerous--whodunit of her own.
Claudia's desire to untangle this particular case--and even her work as a verifier in the first place--is tied up in her family's legacy and her desire to reject the model minority role repeatedly placed upon her. Instead of a Chinese boy her mother approves of, or the job her brother secured for her upon college graduation, Claudia wants to build her own life, one in which she can be the heroine of her own story. But she quickly discovers that "a lifetime spent in the company of Holmes, Poirot, Maigret, and Yuan" is not adequate training for figuring out how someone may have gotten herself killed (or preventing the same from happening to her), pushing The Verifiers from slow-burning literary mystery into literary suspense as it progresses.
The Verifiers is as delightful as it is insightful, clipping along at a pace reminiscent of the mystery novels Claudia herself loves so much. As Claudia starts to make sense of the smudges of clues and details in her brain, readers are treated to the same process of figuring it all out--often delivered, it feels, with a wink and a nod from Pek, for those readers keen enough to catch the clues hidden along the way. Within this, Pek poses deep and thoughtful questions about romance, privacy, family, data, corporate greed and big tech--to name just a few. It's a lot for a debut novelist, but Pek delivers, and The Verifiers is sure to leave readers looking for more from this new voice in the genre. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer
Shelf Talker: This literary mystery asks big questions about tech and privacy, couched in a perfectly paced whodunit, imbued with hints of great mystery novels from the past.