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WORK TITLE: The Rivals
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WEBSITE: https://janepek.com/
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NATIONALITY: Singapore
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PERSONAL
Born in Singapore; married.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A.; New York University School of Law, J.D.; Brooklyn College, M.F.A. (fiction).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, and lawyer at a global investment company.
AVOCATIONS:Martial arts, theatre, cycling.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short fiction to Brooklyn Review, Witness, Conjunctions, Literary Hub, and Best American Short Stories.
SIDELIGHTS
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Jane Pek is a lawyer and writer working in New York. Born in Singapore, she went to America for college, earning a law degree from New York University, and has always been interested in writing. She began the “Claudia Lin” mystery series with the 2022 The Verifiers, which blends social media, big tech, and corporate conspiracies. The book was named one of the Washington Post’s Best Mystery Books of the Year.
In The Verifiers, set in New York City, Taiwanese American Claudia Lin believes she has just secured her dream job working for Veracity, a referrals-only online-dating detective agency that verifies if clients in dating sites are being honest. But she soon learns that everyone lies, especially in dating apps, with disastrous consequences, as evidenced by her first client, Iris Lettriste, who committed suicide. Claudia discovers an app that tracks people’s every move through their cellphones. An avid murder-mystery reader, Claudia aims to emulate her favorite character, the intrepid Inspector Yuan, set in Imperial China, with humorous results. Meanwhile, Claudia confronts her dysfunctional immigrant family—a mother who wants her to marry a nice Chinese boy, not knowing she’s a lesbian, and her more successful siblings she is constantly comparing herself to.
In an interview with Elise Dumpleton at Nerd Daily, Pek explained that the inspiration for the book came from finding her wife on OkCupid, learning about wedding detectives in India, and how online dating “changes the traditional ways we view and conduct romance, how people choose to present themselves online, and of course the question of truthfulness,” then she thought, “what if there was an agency that verified people’s online-dating personas?”
Pek’s technothriller also delves into today’s surveillance of people’s everyday lives by companies like Facebook and Amazon which collect the data that you provide on their platforms. She told Naomi Elias in Los Angeles Review of Books: “It’s something that we know is happening and, especially over the last few years, has been gaining traction… I thought it was interesting to explore how much data we actually provide to these companies and that question of, ‘What could they be doing with it?’”
Calling The Verifiers a “cool, cerebral, and very funny novel,” a writer in Kirkus Reviews reported: “With an inquisitive, clever, and curious narrator, this adventurous mystery is both scary and hilarious.” In Library Journal, Beth Farrell commented: “Pek’s clever and absorbing plot highlights the danger of the misuse of collected personal data.”
In the second book in the series, The Rivals, Claudia Lin works with business partner, Becks, and tech expert, Squirrel, at the Veracity dating app verification agency. When new client Mason Perry asks them to look into his new date, Amalia Suarez, then promptly ends up dead, Veracity discovers a secret artificial intelligence conspiracy where dating apps gather personal data for malicious purposes and aren’t above murder to keep their secrets. As Claudia and Becks begin a romance, Claudia learns that her brother may be caught up in the corporate conspiracy. “A keen knowledge of spy thrillers and detective stories fuels Lin’s excellent investigation into matchmaking apps,” declared a writer in Kirkus Reviews, while a Publishers Weekly critic said: “emotionally complex characters and Claudia’s snarky yet achingly candid voice earn readers’ investment.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2021, review of The Verifiers; August 15, 2024, review of The Rivals.
Library Journal, June 2022, Beth Farrell, review of The Verifiers, p. 77.
Publishers Weekly, December 13, 2021, review of The Verifiers, p. 56.
ONLINE
Jane Pek website, https://janepek.com/ (January 1, 2025).
Nerd Daily, https://thenerddaily.com/ (February 27, 2022), Elise Dumpleton, “Q&A: Jane Pek, Author of ‘The Verifiers.’”
Los Angeles Review of Books, (April 18, 2022), Naomi Elias, “Data-Driven: A Conversation with Jane Pek.”
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (December 2024), review of The Rivals.
I was born and grew up in Singapore. My debut novel The Verifiers was published by Vintage/Knopf in February 2022. The Verifiers was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an Indie Next and LibraryReads pick, a Good Morning America recommendation, and a Phenomenal Book Club selection. My short fiction has been anthologised twice in The Best American Short Stories. I currently live in New York, where I work as a lawyer at a global investment company.
Some of the things I’m into: picking up different martial arts, reading coming-of-age novels, watching contemporary theatre, and cycling around the city in search of superlative almond croissants.
Alumni Spotlight: Jane Pek (2008-2014; New York)
May 22, 2023
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Cleary Gottlieb alumni often reflect upon their time at the firm with fondness and gratitude.
Jane Pek (2008-2014; New York), Director (Legal & Regulatory) at Temasek International (USA) LLC, shares some of her thoughts below.
When were you at Cleary, what group were you in, and why did you choose Cleary?
I was in M&A. Ironically, I went into Cleary thinking that was the one group I didn’t want to be in because it would be too intense, all-nighters, etc. Then I was staffed on an M&A transaction that ended up taking over my life for a few months, and while that part was non-ideal, I realized I really enjoyed the pace and dynamics and moving pieces.
What skills did you learn or experiences did you have at Cleary that have served you well?
I learned so much! Legal drafting skills, how to analyze and communicate about complex legal issues, how to be appropriately anal about work product. The best thing about Cleary, though, was the people I met, who were smart and funny and kind and interesting. I remain good friends with a number of them, even though we have all moved on from Cleary at this point.
Tell us your path from Cleary to where you are now.
After Cleary, I took a break from the law for a few years – I spent a year in Singapore, where I’m originally from, and did an MFA in fiction-writing at Brooklyn College. I loved my time at the MFA, but towards the end of it I started to panic about financial security or the lack thereof and ran back into the comforting arms of corporate law. I found a job as in-house counsel at the New York office of Temasek, a global investment company based in Singapore, which is also a Cleary client!
After Cleary you went to Temasek. What do you enjoy most about your role?
Getting to work on a wide range of matters – we invest in everything from early-stage startups to PE buyouts to public markets, across different industries – and learning about all kinds of interesting companies, developments, and trends.
What’s the biggest misconception about your job?
That I work at a PE fund (which I don’t because we don’t take third-party money) or a sovereign wealth fund (while Temasek is owned by the Singapore government, we also don’t invest government monies).
If you can share, what legal issues do you often need to consider?
Regulatory implications are always important for us, especially in this current environment. Structure, governance, and exit rights are also things that I often think about.
What has surprised you?
The degree of autonomy I have, which I definitely appreciate!
You are also an author, having recently written and published your debut novel, The Verifiers. When did you first discover your love for writing and what inspires you?
Writing has been the one constant in my life, something I’ve done since I was a kid and that I’ve kept coming back to. I love the “what if?” in fiction, and how it provides us with a way of exploring human questions and concerns that can be both timely and timeless.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
Best – toss-up between “Write something that only you would be able to write” and “An ending should be surprising yet inevitable.”
Worst – from a well-meaning friend: “Come up with a formula and follow it!”
What’s next for you on the writing front?
I was fortunate enough to sell the next two books to The Verifiers, thus turning it into a trilogy! So I’m working on Book 2 right now, and cursing my lack of foresight with respect to various things I said in Book 1 that I now have to live with in Book 2 and going forward. I also write short fiction, and have a story coming out in a literary magazine called Electric Literature this summer.
Do you have any favorite memories from your time at Cleary?
There were some great three-hour summer lunches . . . I also remember fondly, no doubt because enough time has passed, a Bank of America M&A deal that I was on as a first-year where, because there was so much going on, I ended up working directly with the client on a piece of the transaction – the Cleary team was great, the client was forgiving, and I learned a ton.
What advice do you have for a young Cleary associate who may want to pursue a similar career path?
For any Cleary associates who may be interested in becoming fiction-writers, I’d say the most important thing is establishing the time and mental space and discipline to actually get the book written.
What advice would you offer any young associate that you wish someone had offered you?
Sleep as much as you can, when you can.
Is there anything I haven’t asked you about yet that you would want to share with the Cleary community?
These are all great questions!
Data-Driven: A Conversation with Jane Pek
Naomi Elias talks to Jane Pek about her debut, “The Verifiers,” a mystery revolving around an online-dating detective agency.
By Naomi EliasApril 18, 2022
Noir
IN HER DEBUT NOVEL, The Verifiers, Jane Pek introduces us to Claudia Lin, a millennial New Yorker who is eager to please at her new job at a dating detective agency. The book follows the events of Claudia’s first case, an assignment that quickly goes awry when her client winds up dead and places her at the heart of a mystery that grows bigger the more she investigates it. Pek’s writing takes us on an intimate behind-the-scenes tour of the tech world to uncover secrets about the kinds of companies millions of Americans comfortably give their data to in order to find love, or something like it. The setting — a workplace dedicated to figuring out how and why we lie to each other — is smartly chosen, as it comes with built-in intrigue and drama. In The Verifiers, Pek balances energetic writing with measured pacing. A mystery lover herself, Pek also infused the book with cheeky self-aware nods to classic detective tropes that help thwart expectations, resulting in a debut that leaves a strong impression.
Pek lives and works in New York, but for our Zoom call in late January I caught the author while she was traveling abroad in Thailand. During our chat, she tells me about how she wanted to play with people’s perceptions of Asian women, getting inspired by wuxia (Chinese sword-fighting) shows, and why predictive technology is a double-edged sword.
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NAOMI ELIAS: Claudia Lin is a 25-year-old Chinese American who self-describes as a “petite, soft-spoken Asian female.” She says she’s invisible to the police and most of society. How did you land on her as the right protagonist for your book? Are there traits you wanted her to have and some you purposefully avoided giving her?
JANE PEK: This surprises people who have read the novel, but Claudia was actually the last piece of the novel to fall into place. For much of the time that I was writing, I actually had a different protagonist altogether who was also a gay female, but who was white and grew up in the Midwest. I think part of that was just that I didn’t want it to be that close to who I was, because then there’s always that fear that people will conflate the author with the protagonist. But that was also, ultimately, why the previous version of the novel wasn’t working. I didn’t really understand the character or the character’s family or their background and personal history that would then inform the choices that they made. Once I switched over and I made the protagonist Claudia, she just came to life very vividly and her whole family fell into place as well. That really made the novel work in that it gave it that voice.
With respect to that specific term that you brought up, it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek in the sense that I do feel like that is the perception of the Asian female a lot of the time — someone who is small and quiet and doesn’t make trouble. I wanted to play on that a bit. I wanted her to present as a petite, soft-spoken Asian female who actually has a ton of opinions in her inner voice and who takes actions that you would not expect someone of that external appearance to take and to use that as a tool in a way for her to get what she wants, ultimately, in investigating this mystery.
And you do have some similarities. I noticed she likes cycling and you’re a cyclist.
Yeah, I did definitely impart the way she loves food, the way she loves cycling, the way she loves books, the way she thinks about a lot of things. But we are also distinct characters.
Of course. So, your book can be described as a technothriller. Not only because it’s set in a tech company, but also because of the centrality of surveillance in the characters’ everyday lives. Characters are monitoring and being monitored by each other left and right. What interested you about surveillance thematically?
It’s something that we know is happening and, especially over the last few years, has been gaining traction. We know that companies like Facebook and Google and Amazon, etc., are providing a lot of free services to us. And the quid pro quo for these companies is, given that these services are nominally free, the tradeoff is that they get to collect the data that you provide on their platforms in order for them to provide those services to you. Like how my Google search is getting more and more calibrated to my personal preferences and similarly with Facebook ads.
I thought it was interesting to explore how much data we actually provide to these companies and that question of, “What could they be doing with it?” It’s more climactic than what may be happening in real life, but I just thought it’s an interesting and important question to explore and one that will only continue to be more important as we get more advanced in terms of artificial intelligence and algorithms and the ability of these technologies to precisely target what it is that they think we want or what it is that they think we are.
And because Claudia specifically works in the matchmaking industry, is there any research you did specifically about large matchmaking services we would know about or any cases that you looked into? Because it’s very detailed, even the way their company operates, or the way data is collected. It seems like it came from a place of deep knowledge about that world.
Oh, that’s great that you think so. In my other life as a corporate lawyer, I am familiar with these types of contracts that one would have with a data vendor in terms of data sets that the vendor would sell to a client and the purposes for which these data sets are then used and the conditions around which the data can be reviewed or used or shared with other people.
Obviously, the data sets that I look at as a lawyer are very different. They’re not about people’s personal lives and dating habits. It’s more like financial data. But I used that as a framework to think, “What if we thought about people’s personal data in that same way?”
Separately, I looked into dating algorithms — and not just dating algorithms — but predictive algorithms too. Like, with Netflix, the ability to predict what movie you want to watch and similar preference algorithms like that. I looked into how those evolved over time. I specifically wanted an online dating setup which was very heavy on the data and which wanted to try and explore the possibility of using data to predict romantic compatibility. The matchmakers in my novel collect a lot of data and then use it with a view toward romantic compatibility.
There’s an interesting meta-framework in the story because Claudia’s obviously not a detective but she constantly looks to her favorite fictional detective, Inspector Yuan, for guidance and has these WWIYD moments. What’s behind that relationship?
I did that because I grew up reading a lot of genre fiction, fantasy and mystery especially. And the thing about the mystery novel is that, on one hand, it is very easy to make fun of because they have all these tropes that can be really over the top. Like the Sherlock Holmes thing where he’s able to tell that someone is, I don’t know, recently divorced and drunk and had an accident 25 years ago because of the way they wear their hat and the way they hold their stick. I felt like it would be fun to play with those tropes. And that’s how the Inspector Yuan series came in, where each one of the mysteries that she references is this obviously exaggerated version of a murder mystery.
I also grew up in Singapore and I watched a lot of the wuxia TV shows and Chinese martial arts movies and so I was like, “Wouldn’t it be fun if I just made this fictional murder mystery a wuxia series?” So that’s in there. I liked the idea that Claudia would actually draw her detective rules from this obviously silly murder mystery series, but that every now and then that would actually work out for her.
Do you have any favorite mystery authors yourself?
From the classics, Poirot would be my favorite. I read a lot of Agatha Christie. I also read Josephine Tey, which I came to a bit later. She’s also a Golden Age murder mystery author. And then, more contemporary picks like — this is more police procedural — but I love Tana French. I think she writes characters so well. A couple of authors that I started reading more recently are Steph Cha, who writes a Korean American detective series, and Rachel Howzell Hall. Both their novels are set in Los Angeles; for the latter, it’s a Black female LAPD homicide detective. What I love about those books, the more contemporary ones, is that they are as much about the detective as they are about the mystery. That was also what I wanted to write when writing my novel.
Claudia mentions in Yuan’s line of work there are “tuning fork” questions that help him ferret out criminals. Were there any tuning fork questions you asked yourself that helped you break this story?
I will say that the mystery was just really hard for me to figure out. I knew that I didn’t want to get the police involved because I didn’t want it to go down that route of evidence and forensics and CSI and all that so that was how I ended up with a murder that looked like a suicide. The idea of the locked-room mystery came along a little bit later, but I like that because that is very classic detective. I think ultimately in terms of the questions that I asked, in terms of figuring out who was responsible and how the pieces come together, I think it would be: What were their motivations for doing this? What would be large enough to cause someone to make such a big decision as to actually kill someone?
I think the distant nature of the crime itself felt similar to the way that we live our lives mediated through tech right now … just a bunch of clicks on an internet browser however many miles away so you can disassociate yourself from the consequences of that action. Everything is layers removed and as a result the consequences of our actions maybe don’t feel as full and as deep as they would if you were actually there doing whatever it is that you are doing behind a screen.
That kind of leads into a quote from Korean director Bong Joon-ho that kept popping up in my head as I read: “We all live in the same country, it’s called capitalism.” He was, of course, suggesting a reason for why Parasite’s portrayal of class and social inequality resonated globally, but in this book the capitalist agenda is almost its own character. It’s like a shadow player governing the killer’s actions as well as the other characters. Can you talk about that a little? Am I reading too much into it?
I will say that with one character, I wanted someone who did something wrong, but was not a villain, if that makes sense. I wanted to try and make them a fully formed complex character who came to feel like this one thing was so important that they would make increasingly dubious choices in order to obtain what they wanted. And then, like you said, at the end of the book, it’s revealed that this thing that they have built has now been co-opted by the private equity owners of the company to try and further their aims, which in some sense is the logical next step of what they created.
I feel that there is a certain inexorable logic to capitalism where you just keep taking that next step and that next step. And then, we look around and then we are now in this world where things are just moving and you just have to keep running to keep up with it. I was almost thinking more of Hannah Arendt when she was talking about with the whole Nazi setup where individuals became cogs in that machine. You just pull a lever or you press a button and you don’t see the ramifications of your actions 10 steps down.
I am in no way comparing capitalism to fascism, but I do think that they’re both very complex systems and I think individuals go into that system and they become part of that system and then it’s just something that you have to keep up with. Right now, we are also seeing some of that in terms of the way that people are reacting to their jobs and the Great Resignation and all that. I think they’re realizing, wait, Why is the world moving so fast? Why must everything happen right now? Why can’t we just disconnect a bit from what we are doing? I think that is, in some ways, the logical outcome of what our capitalist system has created.
Final question. We didn’t really talk about it, but Claudia is a queer character. It’s so rare to have a queer Asian woman in a novel period, but especially as the lead and as a detective character. I was so nervous about her coming out to her mom. I was like, “Oh my God, this is more stressful than the murder investigation,” because I’m not familiar with how a Chinese family would deal with a coming-out story. Why was it important to you and the story that she’s queer? Can you talk about that a little bit?
Oh yeah, definitely. I think it was always important for me to have Claudia be gay and just interested in girls and clear in her mind that she was interested in girls. Part of it was just, I mean, growing up I did not have any of those books so whenever I read books I had to project myself into the mind of the straight protagonist. I would love for there to be more books with gay female characters who are just exploring and having relationships and having that be just a part of the book. I have actually been seeing more, especially in science fiction, a lot of books with gay female protagonists, and that’s just part of who they are.
At the same time, I did want that fact that she wasn’t out to her mother to be a line of tension throughout. Originally, I had thought of not even having that semi-coming-out scene and just having her live her life and save that particular fight for another day. I wrote the coming-out scene the way I did because it feels to me like Claudia and her mother are people who don’t talk about such things, instead they talk around such things. I wanted to write a scene where the two of them would basically be communicating what they were really trying to say in their own way and they would both understand what the other person’s response was even though none of that was explicitly said. I feel like that can sometimes be more true to life in certain more traditional Asian families. At the end of the day, I think it’s very important for there to be more books with LGBTQ protagonists and to have those characters falling in love and having relationships and making their way through the world, so it was important to me to have my own protagonist be that as well.
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Naomi Elias is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared online and in print at a variety of publications including Longreads, New York Magazine, Nylon, and Electric Literature.
Q&A: Jane Pek, Author of ‘The Verifiers’
Elise Dumpleton·Writers Corner·February 27, 2022·5 min read
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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 …
We chat with debut author Jane Pek about The Verifiers, along with writing, 2022 book recommendations, and more!
Hi, Jane! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi! I was born and raised in Singapore, came to the States for college, and now live in New York with my partner. I work as a lawyer at an investment company, and when I’m not doing that I’m trying to write fiction (and also read as much of it as I can). I love consuming baked goods, watching plays, cycling as a form of transport, and dabbling in martial arts.
How has 2022 been for you so far?
Pretty good! I resumed Krav Maga classes, which I had had to stop during the pandemic—starting that up again was about as painful as I had anticipated it would be. And I was fortunate enough to escape East Coast winter for the second half of January—I attended my brother’s wedding in Thailand and then spent Lunar New Year with my family in Singapore, both wonderful experiences!
When did you first discover your love for writing?
As far as I can remember I’ve always been writing—I remember a big notebook that my parents bought for me when I was 5 or 6, and I filled it with (terribly) illustrated stories. I don’t remember if I asked them for it, or if they decided to buy it for me for some reason.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
The first book I ever remember reading and—crucially—enjoying was the Ladybird version of The Firebird, a Russian folk tale.
I can’t recall any particular book that made me want to become an author, but all the fantasy books that I read as a child made me want to write epic fantasies of my own.
I recently finished The Life and Death of Sophie Stark by Anna North, which created such a powerful emotional world that I was totally sucked into its orbit.
Your new novel, The Verifiers, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Online-dating detectives + immigrant family drama.
What can readers expect?
A protagonist who loves Jane Austen and murder mysteries; a locked-room murder with a 21st century angle; a story of a funny, fractious Chinese-American immigrant family; and a look at how contemporary technology shapes our choices.
Where did the inspiration for The Verifiers come from?
I had been trying online dating for a while, and come to think more closely about various aspects of it: how it changes the traditional ways we view and conduct romance, how people choose to present themselves online, and of course the question of truthfulness. (I should say that my own online-dating experiences were generally very positive, and in fact my wife ended up being the first person I met on OkCupid, and vice versa.) Then I heard a BBC Radio segment about wedding detectives in India—detectives hired to check up on prospective brides or grooms, usually by the parents—and shortly after the idea came to me: what if there was an agency that verified people’s online-dating personas?
Can you tell us a bit about the challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
I would say the two biggest challenges were figuring out the plot, and figuring out my protagonist. Which together make up the vast bulk of any novel, so maybe that’s why it took me so long to finish writing The Verifiers . . .
See also
The Amber Crown: Which Came First Story, Setting or Character?
For the plot, it took me a lot of “writing through it”, trying to move the story toward a conclusion that worked. My editor’s help was invaluable, in terms of helping me brainstorm and revise the novel into something that had sufficient, and satisfying, finality. For the protagonist, it took me a while to realise that she should be Chinese-American, a second-generation immigrant who grew up in New York; up until then all the versions of the novel had been narrated by another protagonist who had always felt hazy even to me. I then basically rewrote the entire novel (and along the way, most of the plot) with my new protagonist, Claudia Lin, and this time I found that the narrative voice flowed so much more easily.
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I really enjoyed writing the family scenes, where my protagonist Claudia was interacting with her siblings and/or her mother. I had a very clear idea of their family dynamics (in part because I myself grew up as one of three siblings, and am a first-generation immigrant) and so it was fun to write the scenes with multiple layers in mind: the humour, what is said in dialogue, what remains unsaid, and what all of it reveals about the characters and their relationships with each other.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
I’ve received a lot of great writing advice over the years, from teachers and fellow writers. It’s hard to single out any piece of advice as the best, but one guidepost I use in everything I write is that character should drive plot, versus plot driving character.
In terms of worst . . . hm. I’ve also heard a lot of advice that I disagree with, which doesn’t mean they’re necessarily wrong, just that I don’t think they work for me. One such example would be the idea that there is a set formula to writing a good novel and you just need to follow it step by step.
What’s next for you?
I would love to write a sequel to The Verifiers, and I have some ideas around that. I’m also working on a separate novel that picks up on certain themes around technology that I explore in The Verifiers, but with more of a science-fiction angle—it’s set in a futuristic Singapore and a history-on-steroids version of medieval China, and looks at class, migration and what it means to be human in an era of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and vast economic inequality.
Lastly, do you have any 2022 book recommendations for our readers?
I’m looking forward to reading Joan is Okay by Weike Wang, which just came out in January—the voice in Chemistry, her previous novel, was just so smart and funny and unique. Also, Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, which is out in April, sounds amazing: time travel, moon colonies, detectives. Finally, the third installment of Rosalie Knecht’s series about a lesbian Cold War CIA spy turned PI, Vera Kelly Lost and Found, is out in June, which I’m very excited about—I love the character of Vera Kelly that the author has created.
“All These Personas That We Have”: A Conversation with Jane Pek
Sydney Van To
Sep 7, 2022
Deputy Editor Sydney Van To talks to Jane Pek about the detective story, the future of technology, and our social structures. Jane Pek’s debut novel The Verifiers is out now by Vintage/Knopf.
Sydney Van To: The Verifiers rejects the white male detective tradition and is part of this recent Asian American recuperation of genre fiction. As someone writing an Asian American queer feminist novel, what is the detective story doing for your book?
Jane Pek: I’ve always been really interested in the idea of the detective as a character. That there is some unknown, some mystery, some secret, and the detective can put together the clues and uncover the truth. Literary fiction has that kind of character as well, such as in the works of authors like Haruki Murakami, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Bolaño. My original approach to The Verifiers was more centered around the mysteries of love and relationships rather than a murder: “Why would someone cheat?” or “Why would someone conceal something about themselves?” But I felt like these mysteries were not generating enough narrative momentum, so finally I decided to try killing someone off. Solving that murder then became the narrative engine of the novel.
Murder mysteries, as you say, are white- and male-dominated. I grew up reading Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle; later, Georges Simenon and Josephine Tey. For me, the character of Claudia came first. I had always wanted to write a gay female because growing up, I had never come across these types of characters. I wanted a gay female character who is out there, having adventures, doing these things which are unexpected for someone like her. To be honest, I was hesitant about also making her Asian. When you write a minority character, you worry that everyone will think, “Oh, that’s you.” Those sorts of concerns about being pigeonholed. But ultimately, I had a clear sense about who this character was, and it was that she is a Chinese American, second-generation immigrant, and because of that, she viewed the world in a particular way. Setting it up that way, the way she moves and thinks is necessarily informed by who she is. This isn’t a novel about Asian or lesbian identity, but about someone who possesses these traits, and you therefore see the world from their perspective.
Sydney: I like this description. The evolution of the detective story had begun in this rationalist, deductive mode with a genius mystery solver, but then it moved into noir territory, where more social forces are shown to be at work. The detective becomes immersed in the world as a particular subject, rather than as some detached observer. One thing I see you saying is that, the subject’s worldview inevitably influences how the case is solved, and that is where the politics of representation comes in, while avoiding a kind of pedanticism.
In particular, I’m thinking about the importance you’re giving to adventures. Another benefit of the detective novel is that it allows a freedom of movement which is often withheld from women, queer people, and Asian Americans as people vulnerable to these repeated acts of violence and social exclusion. To say nothing about the toil of a full-time job: I mean, who has the time or energy to go on adventures? The adventure of detective fiction might be a utopian response to a society which surveys, polices, and works certain populations.
Jane: It is a genre which allows the story to be larger than life, while remaining consistent within that story’s universe. Given the rules of this genre, it is within the realm of possibility that Claudia can randomly walk into a job as an online dating detective, and then have one of her clients go missing, and so on. You read because you want to have these adventures yourself. Claudia is a voracious reader, so it plays into why she would want to go deeper and try to uncover this mystery.
Sydney: If we were to be demeaning about literary fiction, we might repeat what one of your characters Lionel, a white male MFA-trained writer who is interested in books “where nothing happens.” But then it is revealed that he’s been ethnographically exploitative and using the immigrant family drama of his Asian American girlfriend as writing material. It’s because the white perspective is exoticizing that Lionel can remain so interested when “nothing is happening,” just as long as this “nothing” concerns racial minorities. Hence, your endeavor to reclaim plot as a way of resisting the expectations for Asian Americans to write or be written about in a realist mode.
Jane: I did an MFA, and I really loved it. But for many of my instructors, plot wasn’t that important; the really important things were language and character. I make fun of murder mysteries, but I also poke fun at literary fiction through Lionel. A story which is plot-driven can be reclaimed as no less worthy than anything else. There’s a lot in literary fiction to be impressed by and moved by, but I always felt like genre was slighted and dismissed in the MFA context. I wanted to write a story that combines genre elements while addressing issues that we think of as “literary,” and also having Claudia be aware of all this.
Sydney: You have an MFA, but you also have a JD. How did that shape your writing?
Jane: I went to law school right after college and became a mergers and acquisitions lawyer (like one of the characters in my novel actually) at a big law firm for five to six years. I took some time off to do the MFA, but then I got concerned about financial security and immediately ran back to the comforts of corporate law. During the JD, I was just reading cases, analyzing, absorbing all of that. I felt the same way with the MFA. It was this period of time where all I needed to do was focus on reading, writing, and getting better at this craft of fiction. I definitely appreciated the MFA a lot more, having worked as a lawyer beforehand. It felt like such a gift to have all this time and space, both physical and mental, to write, to not think about anything else.
The legal training influenced The Verifiers because a lot of the novel is about tech, data privacy, and the uses of data collection. I hope that I was better able to write about these concepts because I had thought about these from a legal perspective.
Sydney: Maybe this could move us into one of the philosophical questions that I saw as being framed in your book. You deal with this paternalist and utopian desire to program human behavior toward higher aims and the increased satisfactions of our desires, which is the way your character Komla thinks about dating apps. For him, dating apps can incentivize you into becoming a better person and match you with the people you’re supposed to match with. In contrast with that, we have something like a liberal humanist attitude which emphasizes individual agency but which might also be technophobic. How does your book work through these positions?
Jane: I think that’s a good way to put it, and very balanced in framing the two sides of the debate. There is a tendency right now to be anti-tech, focusing on all the terrible things that tech companies are doing to us. I don’t want to come down on one side or the other because I’m still figuring it out. In The Verifiers, I wanted to present a well-thought and well-argued perspective via Komla and Lucinda who are the believers in tech. At the same time, I wanted to highlight the fact that we do give up a lot of our data as a trade-off for convenience and efficiency. A lot of the time, we don’t think about this because we only see its immediate benefits. Google Maps, emails, Zoom, social media. They’re all free, but then again, they’re not. In order for the company’s business model to work, they have to find some way to monetize what they’re providing you.
This is just to acknowledge that this is the way we have set up our society to run. Even if an individual wanted to opt out of it, you can’t really. In the last few years, there’s no way to get around without a phone. For instance, in Singapore where I am originally from, in order to access indoor spaces during Covid you had to tap in and out using your smartphone. Then there are places which are increasingly requiring contactless payment. We are moving along this path such that it is harder and harder, and maybe not fair to say to individuals, “If you don’t like it, just opt out.” As a society, we need to think about how we want to structure these new arrangements between us and these companies that have so much information and power. What we are seeing now is all new and unprecedented, and we are having to make it up as we go along: what role the government should play, how much freedom tech companies should have to operate. I tried to use online dating as an arena for talking about these ideas, but they could really be applied to all areas of our personal and social lives to the extent that we rely on technologies to mediate all of that.
Sydney: The detective form helps you with these because the detective is always looking for a bigger and bigger structure. The way I had originally posed the question is perhaps not attentive enough to structures. The idea of freedom for the humanist is already presuming a particular arrangement where you can make use of your freedom. These apps, institutions, mapping, and protocols have already been put in place for you, and you want to remain blind to it so that you can continue to assert this idea that you are free. Whereas the paternalist attitude is blind to the hierarchies and inequalities which it has set up: who is benefitting and who gets to decide on these arrangements. The geographic terrain which your protagonist explores expands into a social terrain.
Jane: It does get a bit scary because if you zoom out far enough, you realize, oh my god, everything is being controlled. The book gestures toward that: how much of what we think are our own thoughts, and how much of our decisions are our own decisions? How well do we really know ourselves? When we think we want something, do we really want it? A lot of contemporary tech is focused on helping you make better decisions by knowing you better than you know yourself. But correlated to that, are they really helping you figure out what you want, or are they guiding you to want what they want you to want? You are defaulted to see what they have recommended. This applies to what you said about structures. In a sense, all the decisions we make are a function of the structures around us. What does freedom actually mean, then?
Sydney: Yes, but you want to stay in the impasse, or at least your novel does. You don’t want to give up the idea of freedom because you are also giving up the critique of inequality and power. So now we are thinking about the masks we wear. This theme lets you juxtapose the family storyline alongside the professional and romantic storyline. Masks are all around us. Although Claudia is focused on the masks we wear for our dating profiles, she comes to realize that she still wears a mask around her family, and her family members are also wearing their masks around her. I don’t think this is necessarily a malevolent thing in your book.
Jane: I like your metaphor of masks, but I had not thought about it through that metaphor. One part of the question, “What does it mean to know a person?” is “Is there really one coherent person to know?” We are all different around different people in different contexts. Arguably, Claudia is less “herself” around herself because she has to conceal the fact that she is gay from her mother, and she has to abide by certain expectations that her family has of her, which she herself does not actually want to follow. But in other respects, maybe this is her truest self because they are the people who are closest to her, in a specific sense. The novel is interested in asking “What does it mean to know other people?” and also “What does it mean to know yourself?” Both of those questions are developed on the personal level for Claudia—what she learns about her siblings, and how her perspectives of them change and develop—and what she learns about the people that she’s verifying—how her initial assumptions about them turn out to be either wrong or incomplete or misguided.
Ultimately, it is a question of knowledge and the limitations of how much we can know. Given all these personas that we have, online and offline, and given how much of how we act are dictated by the expectations of others, how much can you actually know what you really want, as opposed to what you have been socialized to want? At one point, Claudia has a revelation about her brother: that maybe the way he cares about her isn’t just, “I love my sister and I want to do everything for her,” but that it had come out of a place of necessity. The end result is that he does care for and love her. But what does it mean that it only ends up that way because of the original circumstances requiring that he take care of her?
Sydney: I guess this is another way of repeating the question between paternalism and autonomy. Some political theorists think about the process of civilization as putting on a mask. For example, Hobbes says that if we are left to our own devices, we would be ruthless and murderous, but that we restrict ourselves from these impulses so that we can live together. But we have to ask, where do these masks come from and who put them on us? For Claudia, the mask she has to wear to conceal her sexuality from her family is not a good mask. But for Charles, the mask which compelled him to take care of his sister is maybe not a bad mask. So I guess our conversation is moving toward a more sophisticated understanding of intimacy, just as we need a more sophisticated understanding of freedom as not just totally absolute and detached from social structures. So too with intimacy, it would be a function of the different social contexts that we find ourselves in.
Jane: Yeah, it comes back down to structures again. What are the structures which shape our behavior? Out of personal interest, I’ve done a bit of reading about how we think about the brain and free will. Our neurological processes are a structure too. It’s coming out more and more that what we think of as our own decisions are mediated by the chemicals in our brains or the way our synapses fire. Is this freedom as we have traditionally understood it, or are we just compelled by our genetics? I will say that structures shape a lot of how we think, act, and behave. But being an optimist, I like to think that there remains some kind of agency. When we think we are choosing to do this one thing, even if it may have been influenced by structures, there is some value in our making that choice.
In The Verifiers, the limitation to these dating platforms which promised to find your perfect match is that they were being fed imperfect data. The users were giving the data they wanted to give, and these users might not know what they themselves wanted, or felt that they had to say certain things. One thing which I might explore in a future book is: what if the algorithms actually did get really good at predicting who we should be with? Does that mean we should just go to the algorithms and just key in our information and get matched up with our perfect significant other? Or does that take something important away from us, in terms of choice?
Sydney: That would come from a very means-end conception of desire. I feel like desire is just a much weirder phenomenon. It’s not just that you have a desire for some concrete thing which can be directly fulfilled. It’s not even that your desire, albeit unknown to yourself, is a blank which can be adequately filled in by some algorithm. I think desire tends to be propelled toward the thing which is always out of reach or the thing which can never be formulated. Maybe desire is not something that you can ever have a perfect object for.
Jane: Those are very true ways of looking at desire. At the end of the day, technology still cannot get us all the way there. We still have to make our own mistakes.
Understanding the Detective Novel as a Workplace Novel
"[T]he detectives we read about don’t just do their job, they are deeply invested in it."
December 3, 2024 By Jane Pek
Via Vintage
When I meet someone new at a party, What do you do? usually floats into the conversation at some point. The question is, on its face, eminently open to interpretation; the responses, however, on the part of both myself and my conversation partner, invariably relate to work. (Maybe I just go to the wrong types of parties.)
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In part, it’s the sheer amount of time we spend at our jobs. Assuming a 40-hour workweek as a baseline, work is what we do more frequently than pretty much any other activity, including potentially sleep. How much we work is in turn a function of various factors. For some, it’s out of economic necessity, which opens up a whole other discussion about wages and the cost of living and how labour should be valued. For others, it’s due to social expectations and norms around the role of work in our lives. Often, our job is more than a paycheck. It can give us a sense of purpose, structure to our days, some measure of satisfaction. It forms an important part of how we think of ourselves, as an engineer or a doctor or an urban planner—and thus here we are at parties, talking about our jobs.
My novel The Rivals is about a company that helps perennially online New Yorkers figure out if the people they swipe right on are telling the truth—in newest joiner Claudia Lin’s view, an online-dating detective agency, even if no one else who works there uses any of those words. (Her former boss once told her to think of Veracity as a personal investments advisory firm.) Veracity also monitors the powerful dating platforms that their clients rely on to find love, which have proven ready to resort to deception—and worse—in their bid for the ultimate prize in the matching industry: the ability to predict compatibility.
While I didn’t set out to write a workplace novel, The Rivals turned out to be a story that is very much about work. (Neither did I set out to write a mystery novel, which is a separate topic.) Claudia and her co-workers, Becks and Squirrel, compile diligence reports and undertake observations of their targets, as they refer to the people they are hired to verify. They infiltrate the matchmaker which they suspect of misusing its subscribers’ personal data for nefarious purposes, and also of murdering someone who unwittingly uncovered that secret. They argue over verifying methods and strategies for dealing with the matchmakers. Even when Claudia isn’t at work, she’s thinking about it: what the relationship between a client and the woman he’s dating is really like, if she can trust her informant, how she can find out more about the matchmakers’ plans.
In one sense, that’s simply reflective of real life and how much time we spend working. But the centering of work in the narrative is also a fundamental trait of detective fiction. At its inquisitive, industrious heart, the detective novel celebrates work—in all the ways that have come under scrutiny today.
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Saying that COVID disrupted our work status quo might be like saying that people have been known to dress up for Halloween. It put one set of people out of work, required another set of people to continue working despite elevated health risks to themselves and their families, and erased work/non-work boundaries for a third set of people. It also, as global pandemics tend to, created conditions conducive for existential contemplation. Out of that came the Great Resignation, China’s tang ping movement and its corollary of quiet-quitting in the States, mainstream awareness of what the acronym FIRE stands for, and a slew of books and articles questioning the primacy of work in our lives and our identities.
In the world of the fictional detective, meanwhile, work is everything. A crime, typically a murder, is committed, and the detective has to solve it. That’s the whole point of the story: to show how someone who’s good at their job carries out a difficult assignment. The stakes are legitimately high—in contrast to many projects in our own non-fictional workplaces, regardless of what the boss or the client might say. Further danger must be averted, any injustice redressed, victims’ loved ones provided with some measure of solace, social order restored. Perhaps that’s why the detectives we read about don’t just do their job, they are deeply invested in it. Their work is essential to their identity, how they live, the idea of who they are. (With less fully fleshed out protagonists, it can feel like that’s all they are.).
Laurie King’s Kate Martinelli series, a police procedural set in 1990s and early-2000s San Francisco, is an excellent example of both workplace fiction and the workaholic detective. The first book A Grave Talent opens with the eponymous Kate being assigned to a high-profile serial killer case alongside a more senior detective, Al Hawkin, who doesn’t want to be saddled with her. It’s a work situation many of us have experienced, from either angle—fortunately for Kate, she’ll win Al over because she’s smart and competent and dedicated and overall worthy of being the protagonist of a series.
An awareness of issues of gender and sexual orientation in the workplace runs through the books, which were written during the time period that they take place. Al’s initial objection to Kate is largely premised on her being a younger woman; subsequently, he’s relieved that she’s “not his type”, so it doesn’t make working together too distracting. The fact that Kate is a lesbian, in a long-term relationship, is also addressed in terms of work—she’s adamantly closeted, because she believes that being out in any way would make it too difficult for her to be a cop, despite the seismic strain it places on her relationship with her domestic partner Lee. At one point in A Grave Talent, Lee has to accept that if she forced Kate to choose, Kate would choose her job.
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Understanding the detective novel as a workplace novel also provides a possible reason for the increasing diversity in the ranks of our fictional detectives. As previously disenfranchised groups—women, ethnic minorities, openly queer individuals—have not only entered the workforce but taken on jobs in fields they were underrepresented in, we have seen a similar expansion within detective fiction, a broadening of possibilities for the types of characters who previously would never have gotten to play detective. In addition to Kate Martinelli, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan are accomplished female investigators who emerged in the later part of the twentieth century; and contemporary mystery fiction is rife with protagonists who look nothing like the forebears of the genre, even if they may draw inspiration from them. The Pentecost and Parker series by Stephen Spotswood and the Mossa and Pleiti series by Malka Older, for instance, are both queer, gender-swapped takes on classic sleuthing duos (Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, in one case, and Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, in the other).
In The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti, the delightful space-opera cosy-mystery series by Malka Older, Mossa is a capital-i Investigator, an independent police agent, and Pleiti is an academic studying Earth’s ruined ecosystem and its possible reconstruction. They are both women, and have a complicated romantic relationship that adds depth and poignancy to their investigative dynamic.
The Mossa and Pleiti books are deeply about work, the act and process of it, the significance it has for the characters and the world they live in. As a detective in the Holmesian tradition, Mossa is brilliantly logical and relentlessly focused, hellbent on unraveling whatever mystery is at hand. But Pleiti, as well, is someone whose life revolves around her work. She loves what she does and believes in the importance of her research, even if she comes to question the direction of her scholarship. Each book in the series (so far) is structured as a case that Mossa is investigating, but there is more on-the-page discussion of what Pleiti’s work involves, the different ideas that she and her colleagues are pursuing, and why they matter. The thoughtfulness with which Older treats Pleiti’s work—notwithstanding the fun she has with politics in academia, because low-hanging fruit—underscores the respect for and value accorded to work in detective fiction.
A large part of our current cultural discontent with work, I think, is that it can’t be everything that we wish for. It’s incalculably rare to have an occupation that affords us existential purpose, meaningful accomplishment and satisfaction, and financial comfort. Not shifting our mindset about what work should be for us can lead to disappointment; at the same time, accepting a diminished conception of work in our lives and our identities will create resentment about how we’re frequently expected or required to devote the best parts of ourselves—time, effort, attention—to our jobs. Where does that leave us? Escaping into detective novels, perhaps, which despite their inherent murkiness (of facts and, at times, of morality) also contain an enviable clarity. Forget work-life balance, tasks of questionable import, arbitrary deadlines. This case needs to be solved now: let’s go.
***
Jane Pek. Vintage, $17 trade paper (368p) ISBN 978-0-593-31379-4
Set in New York City "circa early twenty-first century," Pek's thoughtful, well-constructed debut introduces irrepressible Claudia Lin, who has recently been hired by Veracity, a low-profile, referrals-only company that checks information for mistrustful clients who want to know whether the people they meet on online dating sites are telling the truth. As Claudia notes, "Matching only fully succeeds if the dating platforms have access to accurate, complete information about the people on them. Problem is, people lie. All the time, especially on the Internet, and extra especially where anything with the potential for romance is concerned." One client, Iris Lettriste, is diffetent. She "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." Ten days later, Iris is found dead, apparently having killed herself. Claudia, who's an avid mystery reader, decides to investigate and is pulled into a conspiracy, all the while dealing with her complicated, dysfunctional family. Claudia's entertaining references to Inspector Yuan, the hero of her "comfort-read murder mystery series," cleverly elucidate her views on literary structure as well as provide investigative tips. This nuanced novel will leave readers eagerly awaiting Pek's next book. Agent:Julie Barer, Book Group. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Verifiers." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 51, 13 Dec. 2021, p. 56. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A688057663/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=47468165. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.
Pek, Jane THE VERIFIERS Vintage (Fiction None) $17.00 2, 22 ISBN: 978-0-593-31379-4
A cool, cerebral, and very funny novel about a young woman who works for an agency that investigates potential online dating partners and who has relationship questions--and quests--of her own.
Claudia Lin has a pretty excellent job. She works at Veracity, a detective agency that helps vet potential partners for clients pursuing romance via dating apps. Claudia is very much into literary mysteries--her go-to comfort reading is a murder-mystery series featuring one Inspector Yuan--as well as literature in general. Her astute, often acerbic observations prove a heady combination, contributing to Claudia's engaging voice: She keeps the narrative moving at a fast-paced clip. When a new client wants Veracity to investigate a recent online flirt who's ghosted said client--and when this request is followed in quick succession by another verification request--Claudia is all in, ably abetted by Finders Keepers, a proprietary app that can track people's whereabout through their cellphones. Meanwhile, in her personal life, Claudia has a stake in keeping her own secrets hidden from her more conventional immigrant family: Not only is she dead set against the type of Chinese husband her mom wishes for her, she also regularly measures herself against her much higher achieving brother and sister. Beautifully complemented by entertaining secondary characters that include Claudia's artistic roommate, Max, and Lionel, Claudia's sister's boyfriend, Claudia is the seductive protagonist in a tale that delves into the dark heart of contemporary technology, not to mention the foibles of the human heart.
With an inquisitive, clever, and curious narrator, this adventurous mystery is both scary and hilarious.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Pek, Jane: THE VERIFIERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A686536672/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c4d3f487. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.
Pek, Jane. The Verifiers. Penguin Random House Audio. Feb. 2022. 11:46 hrs. ISBN 9780593554906. $22.50. M
Eunice Wong's rollicking performance of Pek's debut novel teleports listeners to the busy streets of New York City. That is where the charming protagonist, 20-something, Taiwanese American Claudia Lin, zips across the boroughs on her trusty bicycle and shadows people for Veracity, her employer. Veracity is a rather shady, referrals-only business that investigates the potential romantic partners its clients have met on dating sites to verify these "matches" have been truthful in their online dating profiles and real-life interactions. When her first big client ends up dead under suspicious circumstances, Claudia tries to channel her inner Inspector Yuan, the hero of her favorite mystery series set in Imperial China, which leads to often hilarious, sometimes dangerous, results. Pek's clever and absorbing plot highlights the danger of the misuse of collected personal data, but it is Claudia and her dysfunctional immigrant family who steal the show. Wong absolutely nails her portrayals of the wonderfully idiosyncratic Claudia, her over-achieving brother Charles, fashionista sister Coraline, and their exasperating, constantly critical mother. VERDICT Most listeners will be left hoping that Pek (a Singapore-born, New York City-based lawyer at a global investment company) is already at work on a sequel.--Beth Farrell
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Farrell, Beth. "The Verifiers." Library Journal, vol. 147, no. 6, June 2022, p. 77. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A706701764/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=caf920cb. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.
Pek, Jane THE RIVALS Vintage (Fiction None) $18.00 12, 3 ISBN: 9780593470152
When a client dies unexpectedly, professional verifier Claudia Lin and her business partner explore the possibility that certain dating apps may be offering customers more than they bargained for.
At the beginning of Pek's excellent follow-up toThe Verifiers (2022), Claudia--murder-mystery maven and committed New York City cyclist--and her business partner, Becks, welcome a new client, Mason Perry. The two women, together with tech superexpert Squirrel, comprise a tiny detective agency, Veracity, that specializes in investigating people on dating apps and discovering whether they're telling the truth about themselves. Perry--"projecting a forcefield of confidence that a ballistic missile would bounce right off of" while being vacuous enough to not realize there was a series of Perry Mason books before the TV show--asks them to look into his latest potential date, Amalia Suarez. But faster than you can say "dead client," the verifiers find themselves investigating the possibility that dating apps are creating manipulated personas for nefarious purposes. Ratcheting up the tension, Claudia's brother may also be in danger. As Claudia and Becks explore a potential "far-reaching corporate conspiracy to control the hearts and minds of the online public," Pek has glorious fun with a cornucopia of references to both classic mystery tropes and espionage thrillers. Claudia takes her life guidance directly and very seriously from literature, and may have met her match in Amalia, who wrote a prize-winning college paper comparing Latin American and Japanese magical realism through the fictional detectives of Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami. Tangling with intriguing techies while juggling challenging family dynamics and her growing attractions to both Amalia and Becks, Claudia has her hands--and her heart--beyond full.
A keen knowledge of spy thrillers and detective stories fuels Lin's excellent investigation into matchmaking apps.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Pek, Jane: THE RIVALS." Kirkus Reviews, 10 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A801499976/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f8a27398. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.
Pek, Jane THE RIVALS Vintage (Fiction None) $18.00 12, 3 ISBN: 9780593470152
When a client dies unexpectedly, professional verifier Claudia Lin and her business partner explore the possibility that certain dating apps may be offering customers more than they bargained for.
At the beginning of Pek's excellent follow-up toThe Verifiers (2022), Claudia--murder-mystery maven and committed New York City cyclist--and her business partner, Becks, welcome a new client, Mason Perry. The two women, together with tech superexpert Squirrel, comprise a tiny detective agency, Veracity, that specializes in investigating people on dating apps and discovering whether they're telling the truth about themselves. Perry--"projecting a forcefield of confidence that a ballistic missile would bounce right off of" while being ill-informed enough not to realize there was a series of Perry Mason books before the TV show--asks them to look into his latest potential date, Amalia Suarez. But faster than you can say "dead client," the verifiers find themselves investigating the possibility that dating apps are creating manipulated personas for nefarious purposes. Ratcheting up the tension, Claudia's brother may also be in danger. As Claudia and Becks explore a potential "far-reaching corporate conspiracy to control the hearts and minds of the online public," Pek has glorious fun with a cornucopia of references to both classic mystery tropes and espionage thrillers. Claudia takes her life guidance directly and very seriously from literature, and may have met her match in Amalia, who wrote a prize-winning college paper comparing Latin American and Japanese magical realism through the fictional detectives of Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami. Tangling with intriguing techies while juggling challenging family dynamics and her growing attractions to both Amalia and Becks, Claudia has her hands--and her heart--beyond full.
A keen knowledge of spy thrillers and detective stories fuels Lin's excellent investigation into matchmaking apps.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Pek, Jane: THE RIVALS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804504656/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ab572898. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.
The Rivals
Jane Pek. Vintage, $18 trade paper (416p) ISBN 978-0-593-47015-2
PI Claudia Lin enters spy-thriller territory in Pek’s cunning sequel to The Verifiers. Veracity co-owners Claudia, Becks, and Squirrel are hired by New Yorkers to vet their matches on dating websites, but the agency’s true mission is surveilling the bots those sites use to manipulate their subscribers. When a potential Veracity client, Pradeep Mehta, suspects his disgruntled ex of creating a fake profile on the popular app Let’s Meet using Pradeep’s private information, the Veracity team suggests he file a spam report: “You already know [it] isn’t a real profile. There’s nothing more for us to do.” Then Pradeep dies, and the trio comes to suspect Let’s Meet of co-opting user data to instruct their bots, then killing to keep the practice quiet. Desperate for proof, Claudia tries to cozy up to the app’s developers while navigating her own fraught relationships with Becks and a Let’s Meet employee with opaque motives. Though the stakes are murky and the mystery gets too tangled up in the plot specifics of the previous installment, emotionally complex characters and Claudia’s snarky yet achingly candid voice earn readers’ investment. Lisa Lutz and Rosalie Knecht fans should take note. Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group. (Dec.)