Author Jane Pek discusses her new book "The Rivals," named top 10 mystery of 2024
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Words on a page are just the beginning of getting a book published. It often takes teamwork between an author and a literary agent. In 2022, author Jane Pek's first book, "The Verifiers," was named a Top 10 Best Mystery Novel by the Washington Post. It's now given the same honor to her new book "The Rivals," out this week.
Mary Calvi talked to Pek and her literary agent, Julie Barer of The Book Group, about bringing the books to publication. They follow the character Claudia Lin, who is an online dating detective in New York City.
"She's a 20-something Queens native trying to make her way in New York, both figuratively and literally, because she cycles everywhere in the city," explained Pek. "She loves books, especially Jane Austen, and classic murder mysteries. She gets to find out if the clients she meets on dating platforms are in fact telling the truth about who they say they are, which as we may know from online dating, might now always be the case. Along the way she finds that she starts investigating the dating platforms themselves."
Barer signed Pek for representation after reading the manuscript of her debut novel "The Verifiers."
"I fell in love with Claudia Lin, the main character, right away," says Barer. "Jane's books are literary mysteries wrapped up in immigrant family dramas. They are about a main character who loves Jane Austen, who is an amateur detective, and I was really taken in by the way she was exploring A.I. and dating platforms and using them to talk about technology and love. I couldn't resist."
Pek submitted her manuscript to Barer in the 'slush' pile.
"I had no connection to her at all," Pek says. "I just sent her an email out of the blue. I didn't think she would even open the email because agents, especially agents like Julie, get hundreds of emails every day. She actually opened it and she responded to me the next morning and actually it's seared in my memory because it was Friday morning. She said send me the whole manuscript. She read it over the weekend. Then she emailed me saying she wanted to represent me. Honestly, my head kind of exploded."
Mary asked Barer about advice she gave Pek while she wrote "The Rivals" and that Pek posted on social media. The guidance was "every scene needs to go somewhere/change something."
"What we really wanted to focus on was even in a scene where there isn't a dead body on the page, you always want to be moving the story forward," Barer explained. "You always want the reader to feel that tension and that forward momentum."
"It was a bit of an epiphany for me," said Pek. "There were scenes that I had in there that were kind of saying more of the same thing. Now I use that as a guidepost for every scene that I write."
You can read an excerpt from "The Rivals" and purchase the book through the links below.
The CBS New York Book Club focuses on books connected to the Tri-State Area in their plots and/or authors. The books may contain adult themes.
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"The Rivals" by Jane Pek
From the publisher: Claudia Lin-mystery novel superfan and, until recently, clichéd underemployed English major-has scored her dream job: co-running Veracity, a dating detective agency for chronically online New Yorkers who want to know if their prospective partners are telling the truth. Unfortunately, along the way, she and her colleagues-tech savant Squirrel, and the elegant and intimidating Becks-have uncovered a far-reaching AI conspiracy. And the corporate matchmakers may be resorting to murder to protect their secrets.
In the wake of a client's sudden death, Claudia convinces his ex, an industry insider, to turn on his employer and feed the verifiers information about what the powerful dating platforms are really up to. But even as Claudia starts to get a feel for this new genre-just call her Lin, Claudia Lin-she's distracted by the possibility of romance with both Becks and a very charming target. She also fears that her beloved older brother is unwittingly being drawn into the matchmakers' deadly web. And as Becks reminds Claudia: spy tropes dictate that someone you trust will betray you
Jane Pek lives in New York.
"The Rivals" by Jane Pek (ThriftBooks) $15
Excerpt: "The Rivals" by Jane Pek
Mason Perry strolls into Veracity on a permafrosted January morning to tell us about his case, tripping all my Pavlovian-dislike responses as he goes.
As he talks, I gradually figure out why. He's too sure. Of himself: because he's handsome and urbane, and also well-off and successful—we know from our pre-check that he played lacrosse at Dartmouth and works in investment banking. That we'll be only too ready to help him, because of all of the above. That the world is a place where he can have whatever he wants, because he's never had an experience to the contrary. For an instant I wonder what it would be like to be Mason Perry, someone like him, if I would also be going around bestowing my winningly asymmetrical grin on all and sundry, projecting a forcefield of confidence that a ballistic missile would bounce right off of.
"How long will that take?" he asks, and eases back into his chair.
I refrain from looking at Becks, seated next to me, to see why she hasn't started machine-gunning through our list of intake questions as she typically does. Mason Perry interrupted our latest disagreement—rather, the latest episode in our interminable epic of a disagreement—and I don't want her to interpret that action as a sign of détente.
Becks begins tapping a fingernail on the surface of the table, a slow, considering sound; and kicks my shin beneath it. I jolt. Mason Perry, who so far has been floodlighting Becks with his attention, blinks at me.
Right: my turn to lead the client intake session.
I sit up straight, as if better posture can compensate for the fact that I stopped listening to what Mason was saying two sentences in, and ask, "Were your parents really into Erle Stanley Gardner?"
Across from us the robust glow of Mason's face dims into confusion.
"He wrote the Perry Mason novels," I say.
"That show came from a book?" says Mason Perry. "I had no idea."
"I think you have your answer," Becks says to me. Rather, those are the sounds she's making—what she's really saying is: Jesus Christ, I would fire you if I could.
She turns back to face Mason Perry. "What's the woman's name?"
"Amalia," says Mason. "Amalia Suarez."
Becks says, "Any reason to suspect she might not be telling the truth about anything?"
He pauses. There's a staginess to it—to his entire manner, as if he's imagining an invisible film crew trailing behind him, recording his every hand-wave and head-tilt.
"There must be something," says Becks. "Otherwise you wouldn't have come to us."
"That right?" he says. "You don't get people coming to you just to . . . make sure?"
"They generally have better things to do with their time and their money."
Mason says, his gaze floating past us like his inner director has asked him to turn up the pensive dial, "You meet someone and she's the girl of your dreams. What's more important than confirming that she's really what she seems to be? That you're not going to end up destroying your life over something that doesn't even exist?"
I must admit, he does pensive well.
Now I do glance at Becks, to see what she's making of all of this. Her profile is sharp enough to cut. She's wearing her default expression of disapproval inflected with boredom. It's annoyingly elegant, as is everything else about her.
"How do you know?" I ask Mason, because that kind of all-in declaration always intrigues me. "About her being the girl of your dreams?"
He continues looking into the middle distance for another beat. Then he breaks out the dentist's-dream smile, and says, "You just know."
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There are a few different ways to describe Veracity LLC and what we do as verifiers.
When I'm at a party and someone asks me about my job: I work at a small company that conducts independent research for matchmakers.
What Veracity's founder and ex-big boss Komla Atsina said when he hired me: think of Veracity as an investments advisory firm, in the interpersonal space.
What all our clients think: we're an online-dating detective agency, sussing out whether the people they meet on matching platforms are lying about themselves.
What I learned after I made some questionable decisions around disregarding company policies and the like (although, hey, good thing I did in the end): Veracity was set up to verify not only individual daters, but the matchmakers themselves. In furtherance of their corporate mandate of profit maximisation, the Big Three matchmakers—which together account for four-fifths of the market—had taken to seeding bot profiles within their own systems, at first to pad their subscriber numbers and subsequently for even more dubious purposes. Last year we found out that Soulmate, the Walmart of dating platforms, had developed bots capable of passing as your average socially obtuse human; and the people in charge of Soulmate were raring to start using them to manipulate subscribers' behaviours and preferences.
What Becks and I have been tussling about ever since Komla exited two months ago, leaving us, along with our resident misanthropic tech savant Squirrel, as co-partners of Veracity: what to do with this information. After all, what sort of self-respecting detective story stalls out with: and they sat back to watch the bad guys continue on forever after?
Whenever we get on the hamster wheel of that argument, Becks will start racing to inform me yet again, like the character saddled with bringing the reader up to speed in chapter one of a sequel, why it's too risky for us to do anything except exactly that: watch, and wait. She'll lead with how the Big Three are billion-dollar companies, versus our two-and-a-half person operation mucking around on the third floor of a townhouse in Tribeca. (Here she'll sneak in something snide about Squirrel, wasted because he's never around to hear it.) She'll expound on how Veracity is already hacking into the matchmakers' systems in order to keep tabs on the synths, as we refer to this new generation of bots, and we don't want to give them additional opportunities to learn about us. Finally, as if I could ever forget, she'll remind me that the person running Soulmate's synth programme, the very brilliant and very disturbed Lucinda Clay, went so far as to murder a journalist who was trying to write an exposé—and she knows I'm going to say we don't need to worry about Lucinda anymore, which is blatantly wrong for as long as Lucinda herself isn't dead, and regardless there'll be plenty of other people at the matchmakers willing to adopt Lucinda's problem-solving approach, because human beings are a f*****-up species.
Earlier today, when Becks invoked the R-word twice in the same sentence, the impulse control gateway of my brain—never too securely latched at the calmest of times—clanged open, and I said, "You're not scared, are you?"
And thank goodness that right then both of our phones pinged to indicate that someone was outside the building buzzing to be let in, and our screens brightened with Mason Perry's visage, and so instead of proceeding to eviscerate me like she obviously wanted to do Becks tapped the Entry button on her phone screen and headed into the conference room.
From The Rivals by Jane Pek. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
