The Verifiers

Jane Pek

A snappy detective caper mashed-up with family drama in New York City? Yes, please.

Welcome to Veracity, a referral-only, online-dating detective agency. Need to know if your potential romantic partner’s online profile is legit? The agents of Veracity can help you answer questions like: Are they telling the truth about their job? Are they really single? How many online dating profiles do they have — and how many potential partners are they stringing along at once?

Our heroine and narrator is Claudia Lin. Honestly, she’s living the dream scenario: She wrote her senior thesis on Jane Austen, and she’s a lifelong fan of mystery novels — and now she’s working at a romance detective agency. As she says early in the book, ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single person in possession of a superlative dating profile must not be lying about anything.’

Claudia is inquisitive, clever, and independent, sometimes to her detriment. She lives in Queens and rides her bike all over New York City. And she’s gay, a secret she’s keeping from her very traditional mother, who desperately wants Claudia to settle down and marry a nice Chinese boy. But she’s just a curious girl who likes books and other girls.

Claudia’s first big case is a mysterious client who’s suspicious of two suitors — one who’s ghosted her and another who might be lying to her. Just as Claudia digs into the investigation, the client goes missing in the real world and online. Overnight, all of her profiles are gone.

Claudia is thrilled to find herself in the middle of a real-life mystery, so when her bosses order her to back off, she secretly continues the investigation and gets herself into all manner of sticky situations on her way to the truth.

The mystery plot has a nice forward momentum, but it’s Claudia’s family dynamics that add depth to the story. Her mother is an unhappy, bitter woman, unafraid to spread that misery around. Her brother is a driven over-achiever; their sister, a stunning beauty. And then there’s Claudia. Her siblings routinely call her the favorite; she’s also the target of their mother’s most biting critiques. This family knows where to find each other’s tender spots and poke them repeatedly. After a typically disastrous family dinner, Claudia says, ‘It isn’t a proper Lin family gathering until everyone is upset.’

It’s also a delight to spy on the inner workings of this unique detective agency. Instead of working the phones like old gumshoes, these thoroughly modern investigators pore through text chains for clues. Forget all-night stakeouts; they use a custom app to track their targets. Author Jane Pek employs technology and online identity issues as a jumping-off point to explore how tech changes our interactions and how our online bits and bobs create a version of us that may or may not align with real life.

Red herrings, high-stakes peril, and a big reveal at a glitzy gala — this book hits all the highs of a classic detective story. But under the hijinks, it explores how we use personal stories to define ourselves — and how we can decide to rewrite those stories however and whenever we want.

At my verifier interview, when Komla explained what Veracity did and I said, with maybe a tad too much enthusiasm, ‘Like a detective agency?’, he looked faintly perturbed — which, I’ve come to realize with Komla Atsina, possibly meant he was one wrist flick away from consigning my résumé to the shred pile. That man is harder to read than Finnegans Wake. A detective agency might seem like an obvious parallel, he said, but he tried to dissuade clients from viewing Veracity as such. The verifiers didn’t solve crimes, and they didn’t intervene in the course of events beyond reporting their findings to their clients. Think of us, said Komla, as a personal investments advisory firm. A month into the job, it’s obvious to me that all our clients think of us as a detective agency. — Jane Pek

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