This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today, I’m recommending The Verifiers by Jane Pek, a book The Washington Post hailed as one of the best mystery books of the year for 2022.
Claudia Lin is young, Asian, bookish, queer, a Queens native and a bit of a slacker. After she dips out of the fast-track finance job her successful brother arranges, Claudia signs on to play a detective of sorts at a shady start-up called Veracity, which verifies the identities and stories of users on online dating apps. A lifelong mystery reader who wrote her senior thesis on Jane Austen, Claudia believes she’s landed her ideal job—even though she’s never used a dating site and doesn’t have much to do with the digital world.
Her passion and seemingly fortuitous lifelong preparation for the job quickly leads to both revelation and disaster when Iris Lettriste, a mysterious client hires Veracity to investigate two suitors, one of whom she’s never actually met. Veracity’s bread-and-butter is outing liars—cheating spouses, folks falsifying their jobs or ages, and players juggling apps and profiles. But Claudia senses something else is going on with Iris, and when she goes missing from both the real and digital worlds, Claudia breaks protocol to investigate—and uncovers a turbulent whirlpool of personal and corporate deceit.
The Verifiers provides all of Claudia’s and I bet quite a few of you noir readers out there’s favorite tropes (enigmatic client, amateur detective, lots of red herrings) but with a decidedly 21st-century twist. It’s perfect for Nancy Drew and Veronica Mars fans and cements Jane Pek as an intriguing new voice in the genre.
Check out The Verifiers and other genre-bending mysteries like it at the Sioux City Public Library.
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