The Verifiers, by Jane Pek

This is one of my favourite new novels, and definitely my favourite mystery, that I’ve read in awhile. I raced through it in 24 hours and I sincerely hope there’s going to be a sequel. I could read a whole series of mysteries starring amateur sleuth Claudia Lin, a twenty-something New Yorker who works at a shadowy start-up whose job is to “verify” the identities of people their clients meet through online dating. The founder of the company insists they’re not detectives, but Claudia really, really wants to be, and when one of Veracity’s clients, who has been making odd and unusual requests of the verifiers, turns up dead, it’s Claudia’s moment to put all her fantasies of being just like her favourite fictional detective into reality.

I loved so much about this novel — the mystery itself, the deeper and troubling questions it explores about the use of our data online to not only predict but influence our behavior, the vivid descriptions of New York City as Claudia, a dedicated cyclist, wheels through it. Mostly, I loved Claudia as a smart, witty first-person narrator, and the complicated dynamics of her family with her Chinese immigrant mother and two siblings. This is rich, brilliantly drawn main character/amateur detective surrounded by interesting and well-developed secondary characters, and there’s so much material here — even a mystery-within-the-mystery left tantalizingly dangling at the end of the book — that cries out for a sequel or, ideally, a series. I really hope there will be more of Claudia.