‘The Verifiers’ by Jane Pek

Published by Verve Books,
30 June 2025.
ISBN: 978-0-85730-920-4 (PB)

At least half of modern life seems to take place online. Setting aside the march of technology in the workplace, our banking, shopping, maintaining friendships can all be done without venturing out of our homes. Even the search for romance has become big business to people with a finger in the technological pie. But how can we be sure that the people we’re chatting to, even flirting with, on our laptops, tablets and phones are what they claim to be? How can we even be certain the picture that made us swipe in the right direction is genuine?

Veracity is a company designed to help with that. And Claudia works for Veracity as a verifier, checking the real-life credentials of people who strike a discordant note online with their would-be partners in romance. She is tasked to look into two men on behalf of Iris: Charretter, who is strangely reluctant to consider the possibility of meeting in person, and Jude, who is so circumspect when they do meet that her suspicions are raised. 

There are three interesting facts about Claudia: she comes from a dysfunctional family; she’s addicted to detective novels, especially a series featuring a certain Inspector Yuan; and she cycles everywhere – and I mean everywhere. Her mother wants her to settle down with a nice young man, but Claudia prefers girls. Her brother Charles wants to run her life. And her sister Coraline is unbelievably glamorous and doesn’t understand why Claudia doesn’t want to be. None of them knows what she does for a living.     

Claudia’s work project comes to an abrupt halt when Iris’s body is discovered in her apartment. It looks like suicide, but Claudia isn’t so sure. And when another woman turns up claiming to be Iris, suddenly everything is extremely complicated. Veracity has strict rules about how far they get involved in clients’ lives, and Claudia is determined to get to the bottom of not-Iris’s death. She loses her job, goes on investigating – and soon finds herself out of her depth.

The Verifiers is a debut novel, but you would never know. The plotting is labyrinthine, the writing is quirky and witty, the settings are varied and vivid and the characters leap off the page. As well as Claudia’s family, there’s Becks, her boss, as prickly as a blackthorn hedge, and Komla, her other boss, smooth and sophisticated and completely impenetrable. Claudia herself is dogged, observant and perceptive, though reluctant to make waves by standing up to her family. She shares a downmarket apartment with Max, who has a lot of friends, and has known her own two best friends since school. 

The mystery is solved before the end, but this is far more than a mystery novel. Claudia’s fraught relationship with her family, and their equally stressful interaction with each other, would make a novel on its own, though here it’s only the background.

If a novel makes me laugh and cry, it’s done its job. This one did both and made me think as well – and conclude that online dating is a maelstrom I’ll continue to avoid!
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick 

Jane Pek was born and grew up in Singapore and now lives in New York. She has a BA in History from Yale University, a JD from the New York University School of Law, and an MFA from Brooklyn College. Her short fiction has been anthologised in The Best American Short Stories 2020 and The Best American Short Stories 2021.  

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.