The Verifiers

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 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 show more 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. show less

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 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 show more 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. show less

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 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 show more 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. show less

I should have liked The Verifiers, an amalgamation of three of my book interests: quirky New York women, mysteries, and identity exploration. Bonus, it even claimed to be about dating apps, a subject of considerable interest for me. But sadly, it absolutely could not hold my attention for more than a couple chapters at a time. I was ready to shoulder some of the blame, but in retrospect, much of my flagging interest is due to authorial overreach. Honestly, Sara Gran does it better.

It begins with Claudia at her verifying job, meeting a new client, Sarah, who has the feeling her latest 'match' may not the wonderful guy she thinks he is from his messages. Claudia's company, Veracity, is a pricey word-of-mouth operation that does deep show more investigational dives, both electronic and in-person, for those using match-making apps but are having some doubts. Claudia, an English literature major with a penchant for the highly fictional 'Inspector Yuan' mystery series, relishes the opportunities to practice her investigation skills. (For those familiar with Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt, we can see the parallels early on: the quirky and alienated New Yorker, the mystery, the fictional detective, the complicated personal past). Pek's twist is a technology dimension about on-line personas that segues into machine algorithms and learning.

It's difficult to explain how it didn't work for me without getting extremely spoilery, but in essence, instead of feeling like an integrated story, the narrative tended to take each of Claudia's life dimensions in turn (ie, professional, social, familial). We begin with a mystery, stop over into lit-fic (à la Amy Tan with a detailed sibling history and mother backstory), abruptly turn back into mystery-thriller, then step sideways into a messy literary fiction middle where Claudia works on her dating and friend life, as well as gets over-concerned with her siblings' love lives. Gradually, threads of a mystery try to re-emerge, but they are quickly covered over with technological hand-waving, and interrupted again by a detailed mother-family scene.

It's truly quite peculiar how discreet some of these scenes are from each other. I contrast that feeling with a Matthew Scudder story, for instance, or Claire DeWitt, where realizations in one sphere of life (say, drinking with someone at a bar) continues to play out in another (ie., triggers a mental leap for next step to the case). I can sense where Pek was going here, with dating, algorithms, and choices, and using the different characters of Claudia and her family for illustration. But the larger mystery and philosophical-technological issue--which I have to avoid specifics on for spoilers--ends up getting lost, despite trying to provide a couple of enticing false trails for the reader.

Oh, and don't forget the quirky references to Jane Austen and Inspector Yuan. Perhaps those were the leitmotifs tying it all together, but because Claudia is most definitely not in a Jane Austen novel, and Inspector Yuan is both fictional and somewhat absurd, they actually interfered with story's tone, both in the mystery and the challenging family situation.

"I feel like I can see, maybe, the outlines of… something, the way after your eyes adjust to the darkness it changes from an absence to a backdrop. Two sisters and the silences between them."

But also very awkward ones, like this one from a Halloween scene:

"His block is avid with light sabers and swirly capes, glitter and spandex and face paint, furry onesies."

I hate to be a downer about a book with such high potential; I really do. But this was so not interesting for me that it actually took me a couple weeks to finish, and I often finish mysteries in two days. You want a quirky New York City woman following a fictional detective's advice? Try [b:Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead|9231999|Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (Claire DeWitt Mysteries, #1)|Sara Gran|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312909281l/9231999._SY75_.jpg|14112168]. She's the best. show less

An issue I have with a lot of recent genre fiction is how many authors confuse characterisation and caricature: making the lead character a Bundle of Quirks and giving each secondary character a single Defining Quirk. Thankfully, Jane Pek manages to deftly side-step that issue in The Verifiers. This is one of the best novels I've read in quite a while at making its lead character—in this case, Claudia Lin, a twenty-something Chinese-American lesbian with a dysfunctional family who finds herself moonlighting as an investigator into a suspicious death—feel like an honest-to-goodness real person.

Claudia's not perfect, but she is likeable and believably self-aware. Through her, Pek makes some commentary on what it's like to be an show more immigrant, a member of a "model minority", dating in the age of social media and more, but without ever losing sight of the fact that she's writing in the mystery/thriller genre.

There are a couple of quibbles I had with The Verifiers—particularly at the beginning I wasn't sure how much of this was set in "our" world versus the near future; I never could keep all the companies involved straight in my mind—but they are relatively minor. This was just plain enjoyable. I'll have my fingers crossed for a sequel because I'd really love to find out what Claudia gets up to next! show less

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 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 show more 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." show less

3.5 trending up - very clever and a window on a different world. It's funny how our technology advances creates further need for other services. For example, online dating (in this story) has created the need for Veracity, and the titular Verifiers, an independent, secretive business that checks up on potential online dates. They go a little deeper than google to make sure your match is matching up to their self-proclaimed life. Claudia Lin, 20-something, with a liberal arts degree considers this her perfect job (though her dysfunctional, high-achieving/high-expectation family would disagree if she told them the truth). Claudia loves detective stories, particularly a series featuring Inspector Yuan that she and her mother enjoy. show more Veracity is not a detective agency, her bosses Becks (mean girl) and Komla (mysterious) insist, but the tailing and spying and clue collection feels like it to her. And when one of their clients, Iris Lettriste, winds up dead, (and also reveals a fake identity), Claudia goes into detective mode. What she uncovers is a convoluted, nefarious plot for data mining and usage (and money-making for the masterminds involved). Her sister Coraline and brother Charles provide good distractions to some of the heaviness of the tech-y content, though the family dynamics are a bit intense too. And the NYC setting, which Claudia navigates by bicycle, is exciting. I think I didn't rate it higher because I felt the ending was a bit inconclusive and a set up for a sequel. But overall a fun summer read. show less