![Jane Pek - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B098RH96G1.jpg)
The Verifiers
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 ...
"This book is exhilaratingly well-written. I loved it so much that I didn't want it to end." -Emily St. John Mandel, bestselling author of Station Eleven
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.
"This book is exhilaratingly well-written. I loved it so much that I didn't want it to end." -Emily St. John Mandel, bestselling author of Station Eleven
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.
Editorial Reviews
I.
I can tell right away that Iris Lettriste isn't like the others.
Everyone else walks into Veracity wearing some residue of embarrassment. Their gazes skitter about, their sentences are potholed with ums and wells. They overexplain. They worry that we'll judge them, or they get preemptively angry because they assume we do.
Iris Lettriste. This woman sits down and tells us about the guy she wants us to verify like she's ordering her first coffee of an arduous morning and it's vital that the barista gets it right.
Not to mention: Who goes to a dating detective agency to check up on someone they were flirting with on Soulmate Messenger for all of sixteen days?
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.
"It's highly unusual," Komla is saying to Iris, "for clients to ask us to verify matches they haven't yet met in person."
She frowns like she thinks he's making an excuse to pass on the case. "Why?"
Iris Lettriste is rosy, compact, and purposeful. She looks like someone who makes lists for everything and derives satisfaction from checking off items one by one. According to her Soulmate profile (Flora or Fauna) she's thirty-six years old, a lawyer, into contemporary art and Japanese food. It also appears, seeing her in person now, that the photos she uploaded were all from several years ago, when she was ten pounds lighter and her skin hadn't yet had to negotiate with gravity.
"It's a waste of our time and your money," says Becks. Becks Rittel would be the Mean Girl who grew up without ever getting her comeuppance. I can't decide which aggravates me more, that I think she's hot-she looks like a Valkyrie and dresses like she runs a fashion line for overperforming female executives-or that she thoroughly intimidates me.
"Why is it a waste of your time if you're getting paid?" asks Iris.
Komla says, "We only take on cases where we feel we can have a meaningful impact." Here, given that Iris's match-whom she knows only as Charretter, his username on Soulmate-is no ...
I can tell right away that Iris Lettriste isn't like the others.
Everyone else walks into Veracity wearing some residue of embarrassment. Their gazes skitter about, their sentences are potholed with ums and wells. They overexplain. They worry that we'll judge them, or they get preemptively angry because they assume we do.
Iris Lettriste. This woman sits down and tells us about the guy she wants us to verify like she's ordering her first coffee of an arduous morning and it's vital that the barista gets it right.
Not to mention: Who goes to a dating detective agency to check up on someone they were flirting with on Soulmate Messenger for all of sixteen days?
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.
"It's highly unusual," Komla is saying to Iris, "for clients to ask us to verify matches they haven't yet met in person."
She frowns like she thinks he's making an excuse to pass on the case. "Why?"
Iris Lettriste is rosy, compact, and purposeful. She looks like someone who makes lists for everything and derives satisfaction from checking off items one by one. According to her Soulmate profile (Flora or Fauna) she's thirty-six years old, a lawyer, into contemporary art and Japanese food. It also appears, seeing her in person now, that the photos she uploaded were all from several years ago, when she was ten pounds lighter and her skin hadn't yet had to negotiate with gravity.
"It's a waste of our time and your money," says Becks. Becks Rittel would be the Mean Girl who grew up without ever getting her comeuppance. I can't decide which aggravates me more, that I think she's hot-she looks like a Valkyrie and dresses like she runs a fashion line for overperforming female executives-or that she thoroughly intimidates me.
"Why is it a waste of your time if you're getting paid?" asks Iris.
Komla says, "We only take on cases where we feel we can have a meaningful impact." Here, given that Iris's match-whom she knows only as Charretter, his username on Soulmate-is no ...
Readers Top Reviews
Anne R. Marshall
The Verifiers by Jane Pek is a good mystery in which the suicide was set up so well, only one person, our "heroine" suspected murder. The really frightening part was the company she worked for, a company that did background checks on potential dates one had made via a dating site on the Internet. The services could, and often did, include following the subject of the inquiry. Information that was supposed to be private was not. The algorithms the dating services used were not innocent, instead were manipulative. Just as Google and Facebook use their sites to gather information on their users. Just as I often don't read books about the government and its agencies because it makes my cynical, so should I not read books like this. I don't use dating sites and now I would not consider it for anyone I care about. The name of the company was Veracity. It was small. Only three employees. Iris Lettriste came to get background on a man she was sleeping with, that she had met on one such site. She also wanted more information on a man she had chatted with. He was interesting but never wanted to meet. Then he dropped off the radar for a few weeks, then reappeared. She wanted to know why. Veracity followed up. What they found, she didn't like. Claudia is an interesting character. First generation Chinese, she is very hooked in with her family, a mother, a brother, and a sister. She bikes all over New York. She is gay and lives with a gay male friend, which upsets her mother, who purposely misinterprets the relationship. These folks all add to the complication that is Claudia's life. The mystery is excellent, and ramps up my cynicism when Claudia solves it. This is a book with a very different premise and good at it. I was invited to read a free e-ARC of The Verifiers by Vintage Books, through Netgalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own. #netgalley #vintagebooks #janepek #theverifiers
kathleen g
What a fun (and educational) read this is. Claudia, the youngest child of Taiwanese immigrant parents, didn't find her career nice until Veracity where she verifies the claims of users of dating web sites. Something seems a bit off about Iris who wants more info on not one but two men she's engaging with. Claudia finds herself going down the rabbit hole not only with Chatterer and Mr. Bubbles but wit Iris as well. No spoilers from me but this gets perhaps more complicated in spots than necessary (I got a little lost in the discussion of algorithms), While the amateur detecting and the mystery are well done, what makes this a great read are the family dynamics. Claudia's older siblings Charles and Coraline harbor resentments which she doesn't fully understand. Coraline and her love interest Lionel are terrific. Those who bike to work will appreciate that Claudia rides all over NYC (without lycra)- and I really wanted her to see a doctor about that wrist. And Pek has created believable friends for Claudia as well as coworkers you might recognize. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I very much enjoyed this and look forward to more from Pek (and perhaps Claudia).
Short Excerpt Teaser
I.
I can tell right away that Iris Lettriste isn't like the others.
Everyone else walks into Veracity wearing some residue of embarrassment. Their gazes skitter about, their sentences are potholed with ums and wells. They overexplain. They worry that we'll judge them, or they get preemptively angry because they assume we do.
Iris Lettriste. This woman sits down and tells us about the guy she wants us to verify like she's ordering her first coffee of an arduous morning and it's vital that the barista gets it right.
Not to mention: Who goes to a dating detective agency to check up on someone they were flirting with on Soulmate Messenger for all of sixteen days?
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.
"It's highly unusual," Komla is saying to Iris, "for clients to ask us to verify matches they haven't yet met in person."
She frowns like she thinks he's making an excuse to pass on the case. "Why?"
Iris Lettriste is rosy, compact, and purposeful. She looks like someone who makes lists for everything and derives satisfaction from checking off items one by one. According to her Soulmate profile (Flora or Fauna) she's thirty-six years old, a lawyer, into contemporary art and Japanese food. It also appears, seeing her in person now, that the photos she uploaded were all from several years ago, when she was ten pounds lighter and her skin hadn't yet had to negotiate with gravity.
"It's a waste of our time and your money," says Becks. Becks Rittel would be the Mean Girl who grew up without ever getting her comeuppance. I can't decide which aggravates me more, that I think she's hot-she looks like a Valkyrie and dresses like she runs a fashion line for overperforming female executives-or that she thoroughly intimidates me.
"Why is it a waste of your time if you're getting paid?" asks Iris.
Komla says, "We only take on cases where we feel we can have a meaningful impact." Here, given that Iris's match-whom she knows only as Charretter, his username on Soulmate-is no longer in contact with her, it would make no difference to Iris whether he was lying about anything he had written in his profile or in his chats with her.
"It might make a difference to other people."
I can sense Komla and Becks exchanging their telepathic equivalent of a hmm interesting look. The two of them are so in sync they could set up a trapeze act. Komla's the boss, theoretically, but Becks talks shit about him all the time, both behind his back and to his face. If this were an Inspector Yuan novel, my comfort-read murder mystery series, it'd be easy: Komla would be the headline name and Becks the sidekick. But I'm pretty sure Becks would sooner self-defenestrate than be thought of as anyone's Watson.
Komla says, "Do you have any reason to believe he might be lying?"
"He disappeared once I said I didn't see the point of continuing to correspond if we weren't planning to meet in person soon."
"He could just be shy," I say. I'm thinking of my roommate, Max, and his disappointment when he finally coaxed a 96 percent compatible match into meeting up after two months of innuendo-heavy texting. On Let's Meet, Kilonova was witty, tender, as sensitive as an emotional tuning fork. Offline, Caleb turned out to be monosyllabic, allergic to eye contact, and prone to panicked disquisitions on his PhD research in organic chemistry.
Everyone looks at me like I'm a backup dancer who's started gyrating in the spotlight. "Debilitatingly shy," I add.
Komla nods. "Occam's razor. Why pursue a complicated explanation when the straightforward one is most likely to be correct? Excellent point, Claudia."
In my peripheral vision I see Becks pretzel her mouth like she knows Komla just made me sound smarter than I really am.
"It was more than that," says Iris. "He was a perfectly nice guy, especially compared to some of the winners on Soulmate. But it felt . . . How do I put it? Like he had an agenda."...
I can tell right away that Iris Lettriste isn't like the others.
Everyone else walks into Veracity wearing some residue of embarrassment. Their gazes skitter about, their sentences are potholed with ums and wells. They overexplain. They worry that we'll judge them, or they get preemptively angry because they assume we do.
Iris Lettriste. This woman sits down and tells us about the guy she wants us to verify like she's ordering her first coffee of an arduous morning and it's vital that the barista gets it right.
Not to mention: Who goes to a dating detective agency to check up on someone they were flirting with on Soulmate Messenger for all of sixteen days?
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.
"It's highly unusual," Komla is saying to Iris, "for clients to ask us to verify matches they haven't yet met in person."
She frowns like she thinks he's making an excuse to pass on the case. "Why?"
Iris Lettriste is rosy, compact, and purposeful. She looks like someone who makes lists for everything and derives satisfaction from checking off items one by one. According to her Soulmate profile (Flora or Fauna) she's thirty-six years old, a lawyer, into contemporary art and Japanese food. It also appears, seeing her in person now, that the photos she uploaded were all from several years ago, when she was ten pounds lighter and her skin hadn't yet had to negotiate with gravity.
"It's a waste of our time and your money," says Becks. Becks Rittel would be the Mean Girl who grew up without ever getting her comeuppance. I can't decide which aggravates me more, that I think she's hot-she looks like a Valkyrie and dresses like she runs a fashion line for overperforming female executives-or that she thoroughly intimidates me.
"Why is it a waste of your time if you're getting paid?" asks Iris.
Komla says, "We only take on cases where we feel we can have a meaningful impact." Here, given that Iris's match-whom she knows only as Charretter, his username on Soulmate-is no longer in contact with her, it would make no difference to Iris whether he was lying about anything he had written in his profile or in his chats with her.
"It might make a difference to other people."
I can sense Komla and Becks exchanging their telepathic equivalent of a hmm interesting look. The two of them are so in sync they could set up a trapeze act. Komla's the boss, theoretically, but Becks talks shit about him all the time, both behind his back and to his face. If this were an Inspector Yuan novel, my comfort-read murder mystery series, it'd be easy: Komla would be the headline name and Becks the sidekick. But I'm pretty sure Becks would sooner self-defenestrate than be thought of as anyone's Watson.
Komla says, "Do you have any reason to believe he might be lying?"
"He disappeared once I said I didn't see the point of continuing to correspond if we weren't planning to meet in person soon."
"He could just be shy," I say. I'm thinking of my roommate, Max, and his disappointment when he finally coaxed a 96 percent compatible match into meeting up after two months of innuendo-heavy texting. On Let's Meet, Kilonova was witty, tender, as sensitive as an emotional tuning fork. Offline, Caleb turned out to be monosyllabic, allergic to eye contact, and prone to panicked disquisitions on his PhD research in organic chemistry.
Everyone looks at me like I'm a backup dancer who's started gyrating in the spotlight. "Debilitatingly shy," I add.
Komla nods. "Occam's razor. Why pursue a complicated explanation when the straightforward one is most likely to be correct? Excellent point, Claudia."
In my peripheral vision I see Becks pretzel her mouth like she knows Komla just made me sound smarter than I really am.
"It was more than that," says Iris. "He was a perfectly nice guy, especially compared to some of the winners on Soulmate. But it felt . . . How do I put it? Like he had an agenda."...
