Book Review: The Rivals by Jane Pek

Claudia Lin did not expect to become co-owner of Veracity, a dating detective agency that helps the lovelorn discover whether their online matches are really who they claim to be. But as an aficionado of detective novels – and someone used to living a life of mild but constant subterfuge when it comes to her more conservative mother and two older siblings – she genuinely loves the work, even though it sometimes puts her in uncomfortable situations. This entails more than just the kind of lying and invasion of privacy that are part and parcel of her trade. Online matchmaking is a big business raking in huge profits, and some people will stop at nothing, even murder, to make sure that the money keeps coming in.

Complicating matters is the technology that some of the matchmaking companies and their backers have implemented to lure their users into parting with their money. It’s bad enough that the companies are setting up fake, artificial intelligence-driven accounts known as synths to manufacture flirtations with and subtly influence their customers. As Veracity has discovered:

But as if that wasn’t creepy enough, Polaris Capital, the private equity firm that owns Soulmate, got wind of the synths and saw more lucrative, and far-reaching, use cases for them. Why limit the synths to making uninspired conversation with singletons online, laboring to reshape individual by flawed individual, when they could reshape, potentially, everything? Whether one artist becomes a cultural touchstone and another falls into the void of obscurity, whether one start-up’s clever, frivolous app goes viral and another’s is never downloaded by more than ten people, whether one politician wins their race and another loses: these are all the outcomes of people’s choices. Which means that if you can determine what choices enough people will make…

Even as Claudia and her co-owners juggle their ongoing investigations into the synths with the bread-and-butter cases that keep Veracity running, she finds herself involved with more than just the detective work that she’d originally signed up for. Far from either the Jane Austen-esque matchmaking or the Inspector Yuan detecting that have inspired her career so far, she finds herself embroiled in the cinematic world of spies favored by one of her latest targets. As she recruits a possible mole who works on the technology side of the dating app Let’s Meet, she butts heads with her prickly (and, to her, disturbingly attractive) co-worker Becks Rittel over how to handle their new informant. Practical Becks is exasperated by Claudia’s fictional flights of fancy, but even she has to concede the necessity of cloak and dagger work, saying to her co-owner:

“And the problem with bringing him in isn’t limited to the risk to him. There are risks to us as well. We have no idea how credible he is. Or trustworthy. He could be feeding us a load of bullshit, or turn around and sell us out to Let’s Meet.”

 

“So we’ll test him out for now and limit what we tell him.  He doesn’t even know Veracity’s name. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t give Let’s Meet anything.”

 

I watch an opaque calculation clicking across her face. Finally she says, “No. He’ll be less inclined to help us if we appear to be holding back ourselves. We’ll just give him inaccurate information about who we are.”

 

“As in, lie to him? Our own agent?”

The Rivals takes the murder mystery elements of the first book in Claudia’s eponymous series and adds a fascinating layer of corporate espionage, even as Claudia herself must figure out whether the inexplicable death of a wannabe client was actually attributable to foul play. This sequel to The Verifiers also amps up both the technology and the romance aspects, making for slightly less escapist reading than in the first book due to the increased sophistication of both the technological concepts and the tangled love connections. Claudia’s complicated relationships with the other members of her Taiwanese American family also deepen, adding both grounding and frustration to our heroine’s life as she navigates life, love, and ethics in 21st-century New York City.