Claudia Lin loves mystery novels, especially the “Inspector Yuan” series. Her job lets her play detective in a low-key way: she works for a small, mysterious company called Veracity that investigates dating app customers’ matches to see if they’re the real deal.
When a client comes calling with a story that seems a little off, wanting to investigate two matches that she doesn’t seem all that emotionally invested in, and then disappears, Claudia’s life suddenly gets a little more complicated. She can’t resist the urge to play real-life detective and find out what happened to the woman.
Outside of work, Claudia’s life is in a bit of a holding pattern. She occasionally has a one-night stand but isn’t emotionally available for more. She visits her guilt-tripping mother often, along with her more successful brother and sister, trying to navigate the emotional land mines left from the years that her siblings were raised by their grandparents in Taiwan while Claudia was raised by her single mother in New York. Claudia hasn’t told her mother that she’s gay, though her siblings know, and her mother likely suspects. She’s seen as the least successful sibling, chafing from everyone’s judgement, while still being her mother’s favorite and facing her siblings’ resentment for that.
Claudia just wants to avoid conflict in her own life, and she dives headlong into to the opportunity to solve a mystery. We dive into the privacy implications of dating apps, something most of us are vaguely aware of but which we choose to ignore. What are we really agreeing to in those user agreements we check off but never read? How can we know if a person we meet online is telling us the truth about who they are?
I read this book quickly, and it drew me in. I appreciated that Claudia’s attempts at sleuthing are often awkward and impulse. After all, she’s not a trained detective, and what she’s learned is mostly from mystery novels. It was nice to read a lesbian character where that was just simply one part of her complex personality and story. As much as I enjoy reading love stories, I like reading a queer character who can be more than that while not ignoring her identity.
Occasionally a quirk of the writing made me pause: the dialogue is sometimes written in a fashion I associate more with journalism. We see a line of dialogue, then a quick summary of what the character says, instead of reading the words for ourselves. It’s not a style I’m used to in fiction, except for in areas where a character is tells something we already know and it doesn’t need repeating. It’s not necessarily a negative, but it did occasionally make me aware of the writing style when I just wanted to be immersed in the storytelling. I read in the author’s bio that she is both a lawyer and a fiction writer, and that made sense to me when it came to her writing style. Again, not a problem, just something that seemed different than I’m used to in most fiction.
Overall, I thought it was a good murder mystery, but really the best parts of the book are the characters. I don’t know if there will be any more mysteries for Claudia to solve in the future, but I would definitely pick up another one. I’d like to see what’s next for her, her family, and her devastatingly attractive ice queen co-worker (ok maybe I am hoping for a future love story for Claudia).
I signed up for Book of the Month Club partially because I saw that this was one of the choices for the month, and I’d seen good reviews for it online. BOTM seems to have a fairly decent selection of LGBTQ+ books at the moment, and I have Nina Lacour’s new book waiting for me to read it next. I hope BOTM will keep up those selections, because queer representation is one of the main things that will make me choose a book these days.
If you’ve read this book, let me know what you thought!
