Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: The Rivals by Jane Pek

The second Claudia Lin mystery by Jane Pek The Rivals (Vintage, 2024) has generated some impressive street cred before the book is even released: a starred review from Kirkus and one of the Washington Post’s best mysteries of 2024. Some crime fiction writers work for decades and don’t achieve either one.

The story picks up shortly after the first book in the series The Verifiers ends. Claudia is now co-owner of Veracity, a firm that checks out the dates of their clients to confirm the accuracy of the information the client has been given. It is a curiously 21^st century sort of job, looking up online accounts to review public profiles and tracking them via GPS to determine if the individual is actually where he or she told Veracity’s client they would be. Of necessity the third person in the tiny firm is deeply technical while Claudia and her partner handle the interpersonal and research aspects of the work.

Part of their job is to understand how the big online matchmaking systems function. While delving into the background of one application, Veracity’s technical guru discovers fake profiles that seem to be set up to manipulate the system’s subscribers, a capability with far-reaching implications. The sudden death of one of the engineers working on this hidden part of the system intrigues mystery reading Claudia, who decides to investigate. She inevitably conflates client research with this more involved corporate reconnaissance.

A second story line is Claudia’s dysfunctional family. Claudia’s father deserted the family years ago, leaving their ill-equipped Chinese mother to support three children. All three of the now-adult children and their mother continue to flaunt the scars of the experience. Their interactions are painful to read and envision.

A complicated, multilayered narrative with complex characters and diverse motivations. Anyone with anxiety about conspiracies should not read this book. The repercussions of a system that can influence human behavior as described here are consequential and the idea of a secret society formed to disable it is mindblowing. I am intrigued with the level of data science detail here; Pek has some authoritative sources. New York City is ever-present in the background, akin to a lurking character who doesn’t say much. While the primary storylines are resolved, the cliffhanger ending leaves some threads dangling for the next book in the series.

 

·         Publisher: ‎Vintage (December 3, 2024)

·         Language: ‎English

·         Paperback: ‎416 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎059347015X

·         ISBN-13: ‎978-0593470152

 

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4eUaF8M 

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2024

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.