The Verifiers

The Verifiers by Jane Pek, 358 pages.

Claudia Lin (secretly) works at Veracity, a job she landed after getting a high score in an online mystery game that was actually a recruiting test. Veracity is a referral-only agency that investigates to see if people are lying in their online dating profiles (spoiler alert: they usually are). She's initially excited to get her first real case on the job, but soon begins to question the unusual nature of the customers requests. And when the woman who hired them doesn't show up for their scheduled meeting she begins to investigate, despite her bosses protests. After all, you can't just hire someone because they're really into solving mysteries and then expect them to leave a mystery unsolved. It soon becomes obvious that their customer was not who she said, and the investigation takes Claudia into much more dangerous places than she ever expected in this novel on dating, truth, and choice in the digital age.

I really liked this book! I thought detective-novel loving Claudia was a really fun protagonist, but Pek also did a good job keeping the stakes high. There were several times when it felt like the mystery was resolved only for it to go even deeper. My only complaint was that Claudia often jumps to conclusions without ever really noticing that she's doing that, even after her incorrect jumps get her in trouble multiple times. It's still definitely a cool book though, and I'm looking forward to reading the sequel when it comes out.