I had heard good things about The Verifiers, but it was still a delightful surprise. The main character is smart, headstrong, and thoughtful, and she's determined to approach life like her favorite detective. The mystery itself is also very timely and conceptually interesting. Claudia works for a company that verifies whether people are telling the truth in their dating profiles, and this gets her investigating and thinking about data collection and privacy. Pek gives the reader a satisfying mystery with a fully developed main character dealing with her own complicated family dynamics and personal life.

I'd give it a 4.5 if I could. My only small quibble with the book was that the ending got overcomplicated.

Oof. This one was painful to get through.

The writing is super dry, and all of the incredible detail for everything that happened was so hard to get through - at some point, I stopped caring and started skimming so that I could finish. There's also the feeling that Pek wanted to be funny or have the quirky/funny New York girl, but all of the humor feels forced, which makes it...not funny. I probably would have found a textbook about data algorithms and their connection to dating websites a lot more interesting. The massive amounts of information and terminology that most people - I assume - don't understand (myself included) bored me so much that my eyes glazed over at any point that the data was talked about, which is about 60% of the book.

While I do realize that this isn't marketed to be a thriller, I was under the impression that this would be a mystery. To me, this feels like literary fiction that has a main character who is obsessed with mystery novels that happens to get caught up in trying to solve a woman's murder - or what she believes to be a woman's murder. Also - there were so many people to keep up with - with many of them being mentioned once in the beginning and then me desperately trying to remember who they are at the end. No wonder I wasn't able to make the murder make sense. It also doesn't help that the murderer doesn't really make sense - the motive is kind of there, but it would make a lot more sense if someone closer to the "investigation" was the guilty one. I also want to know why two people though that Person X was the murderer...and they didn't tell anyone until they were able to talk to Claudia and lay out everything they know for Claudia to conveniently put the pieces together (just like in her favorite mystery novels). Gag.

Many thanks to Netgally for the e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

The uniqueness of this book was refreshing. An online dating detective agency??? Sign me up.

That said, the execution was a bit lacking. The premise was there, the characters were there, but the drama was not. I'm bummed about it.

I am a member of the American Library Association Reading List Award Committee. This title was on the 2023 shortlist. The complete list of winners and shortlisted titles is at <a href="https://rusaupdate.org/2023/01/2023-reading-list-announced-years-best-in-genre-fiction-for-adult-readers/">

I loved the layers of this, the meta of it being a mystery book with a main character obsessed with a fictional mystery detective. It also felt very relevant to see exactly how much tech companies can know about someone at any given moment. One of my favorite parts was also the relationships with the family.

I liked the protagonist and her family, and I kept reading because of the intriguing plot. I wanted to know what happened. Not my favorite book of the year, but an interesting one.

I enjoyed reading this book.  It is a good book that keeps your attention. I will definitely be recommending it to my friends and family.

Oh, how I wanted to love The Verifiers by Jane Pek. The synopsis of this one truly drew me in, but I ultimately could not connect with this one. Perhaps, I'll try again at some point, as I generally love female investigator stories. 

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for sharing this book with me. All thoughts are my own.

I thought that The Verifiers was an okay read. Some good mystery and conflict between characters, but I wasn't all that taken with the story. The characters were fine, the lead was okay, but a little boring and delving into the current social aspects of dating and whatnot. This was just not my jam. Big pass for me.

Claudia has a lot of secrets and is also good at finding out what others are hiding.  She works for a top-secret company as a detective with an online dating site.  Really good premise for a story but didn't deliver.

It wasn't entirely what I had hoped. It led with "sapphic love story in a murder mystery" energy in the description, but it didn't quite deliver. I mean, it did with the murder mystery, but the sapphic love story was very, very brief... annoyingly brief. I also felt like the book didn't have to be so long and include quite as many dinners with her family... I got the gist 100 pages back.

clever book about all things techy. Not meant for my age group but I enjoyed it none the less! Very good debut and looking forward to more from this author,.

I tried to separate times to get into this book, but ultimately the writing style and story just aren't for me.

DNF

*I received an eARC via NetGalley, which is the only reason I'm posting this not-really-a-review review.*

Quirky, humorous, and modern- The Verifiers by Jane Pek is a fun quick read. Claudia Lin is a smart, independent, slightly misguided heroine- sleuthing around New York on her bike while also dodging the rigid roles her Chinese-American family wants to throw on her. Claudia works for a very secretive company that verifies people’s online dating profiles, but there might be more to it then she knows. When the customer she is working for suddenly dies, she is thrown into a convoluted mystery that uncovers a darker side to the whole matchmaking business. Claudia is not only in over her head at work, but she is keeping secrets from her own family; a family that has its own set of secrets. All of this comes together in a fast-paced, funny read. Pek develops her characters with warmth and sincerity, and I could definitely see Claudia going on to sleuth in future series. The one thing that didn’t work for me was Claudia’s sexuality. It was quite a point of contention with her mother at the start of the book, but then nothing really came of it. It seemed like a thread that was left to dangle; it felt like something that was forgotten along the way. Perhaps Pek is planning more novels with Claudia and that thread will be picked up again. Either way, The Verifiers was an entertaining mystery. Random rating system- 4/5. Thanks to @NetGalley for the eArc.

Loved this! I almost decided against reading this because of multiple negative reviews I read, so I encourage you to give it a shot if you are interested because it seems to be divisive and people either love it or hate it. The writing, characters, and plot all worked for me personally.

I think part of what needs to be considered here is genre expectations. The Verifiers walks a line between a traditional mystery and literary fiction. If you go into it expecting either one extreme or the other, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Our main character throws herself into figuring out a mystery and sometimes goes to what might be considered unrealistic lengths to continue. All the while, we are also seeing her life outside of that, with a focus on her familial relationships with her mother and siblings. These stories intertwine slightly plotwise, but moreso thematically. Major focus on the dating app industry and (separately!) a look at different ways that siblings can coexist under the shadow of differing parental expectations.

I had a lot of fun with this one at the beginning and felt that it held a lot of promise, but unfortunately the story dragged and I lost interest. It was hard to keep track of the plot and pushing through didn't feel worth it.

Started off good and seems like a good premise but began to feel like a slog about a third of the way in and obviously, that's never a good thing. Plot got more and more ridiculous until this reader lost interest.

Her brother is on the fast track to a successful career in finance and has plans for his sister to follow along. But in Jane Pek’s debut novel, “The Verifiers,” Claudia Lin secretly drops out of the corporate rat race without telling her siblings or mother and takes a job at Veracity, a new start-up that uses algorithms along with good old detective techniques to determine whether online suitors are real or not.
Claudia, a queer Asian American, really isn’t a computer geek. The reason she was chosen for the job by the company’s founder is her passion for reading, particularly the works about a fictitious crime solver named Detective Yuan.
Once she is hired, the firm becomes a three-person endeavor, with Claudia spending her time cyberstalking (the modern way to dig up dirt) and real life stalking, like they do in the crime novels Claudia consumes.
When Iris Lettriste comes in wanting them to investigate the men she’s met online, it at first seems like a simple case. But, of course, they never are. Lettriste is a no-show for her last appointment, and later is found dead of what looks like an accidental overdose of a prescription drug she’s taking.
Claudia’s bosses want to move on from Iris, but she thinks there’s more, particularly after all the online accounts belonging to Iris disappear and the real Iris shows up, saying that her sister has been impersonating her.
That’s enough for Claudia to start sleuthing on her own. Soon she’s fired from her job and almost involved in a fatal bicycle accident because someone has rigged her bike. On the home front, her gorgeous older sister is having relationship problems, and Claudia takes it upon herself to do some detecting to see what’s he’s up to.
Her brother is appalled and disappointed in her when he finds out she has quit the stellar and potentially very lucrative job he arranged for her.
Pek, who has an undergraduate degree from Yale, a law degree from New York University and an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and works as an attorney in New York for an international investment company, says she began the book by asking herself what if there was an online dating detective service, and from there began assembling the story line.
“I liked that Claudia would actually draw her detective rules from this obviously silly murder mystery series,” said Pek who is working on a sequel, “but that every now and then it would actually work out for her.”

The plot is a little bit predictable but otherwise an amazing read. I really enjoyed it! The humor is droll and the writing is excellent.

I really enjoyed this book. The premise is interesting and the end of the story definitely left things open for more of this universe. I really hope we get another book to follow up this one.