The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Pek, Jane. The Verifiers. Vintage Books. 2022. Kindle.

The novel is told in first-person present by Claudia, the protagonist. She was an English major in college, and her successful brother connected her with a fancy corporate job that made their Taiwanese mother happy, even if she was disappointed that Claudia was not dating a “nice Chinese boy” because she was, unbeknownst to her mother, a lesbian. However, after playing an online game called Murder Most Foul that had been designed to recruit an employee to a company called Veracity, Claudia quit her job to become a “verifier.” Veracity was a secret, referrals-only agency run by the eccentric and brilliant Komla that specialized in verifying people that clients met online. The novel begins a month after Claudia first gets the job—when she is assigned her first client. The woman tells Claudia that she has been talking to a man named “Charretter” online for two weeks, but he refuses to meet her and only ever asks her about art galleries. Claudia thinks the woman’s request is strange because usually only people who have met their matches in person—and are quite certain about them—pay the humongous price of having them verified by Veracity. A few weeks after Claudia starts with her investigation, the woman returns and asks for another man to be verified: Jude. This one, she says, was a man she started dating for a few weeks, but he had disappeared and then reappeared in her life. She wants to know if he was serious about dating her. Claudia investigates and discovers that Jude is married, but Komla and Becks report that they cannot verify Charretter yet and ask the client to return. However, the client misses her appointment and then, a few weeks later, Veracity learns that she has committed suicide.

The woman, Sarah Reaves, had been impersonating her sister, Iris Lettriste, on a number of dating sites and with Veracity. The real Iris Lettriste comes in to find out what her sister was doing, but Komla and Becks tell her all that information is confidential. After the meeting, Iris approaches Claudia on the street and asks her to help. She explains that she found a book next to her sister’s body. Four words were written on it: Compatibility, Precision, Veracity, and Romantick. Claudia instantly recognizes them as all having to do with the matchmaking industry and gets curious. She first suspects that Sarah, a journalism student at Columbia, must have been working on an article about matchmakers, but Iris explains that Sarah had quit her grad program because of her constant migraines and was currently unemployed. Next, Claudia starts to think that perhaps Sarah confronted Jude. However, when Claudia raises this idea, Iris asks her to stop looking into the case.

Claudia continues investigating Jude on her own and learns that Sarah did confront hm about being married—and then she has blackmailed him for $100,000. Claudia texts Iris to tell her, but she receives a threatening message in response that again asks her to stop investigating. Claudia begins to suspect again that Sarah was writing an article, and that perhaps Iris was implicated in Sarah’s article somehow because she works at a corporate law firm that deals with many of the biggest matchmakers. This, Claudia speculates, would give Iris motive to kill her sister. Claudia sneaks into Sarah’s apartment and finds her phone. On her way to an observation for a client, her bike pedal breaks off and she injures herself in a crash. Scared that Iris is trying to kill her, Claudia rushes to Veracity and admits the truth to Becks and Komla. Instead of being impressed, Komla fires Claudia for breaking company policy.

Instead of accepting her fate, Claudia decides to continue to investigate so she can prove herself to Komla and earn her job back. She breaks into an online server where Sarah saved her research and then meets with a professor at Columbia who Claudia had an affair with before she took a leave of absence from school. Together, Claudia and the professor realize that Sarah’s migraine medication, which arrived in the mail through an online subscription service, could have been tampered with, which would have allowed the murderer to pull off a perfect crime. Claudia approaches Iris about her theory, but Iris explains that she loved her sister and did not kill her.

Becks and Squirrel, the IT guy at Veracity, approach Claudia and tell her they believe Komla killed Sarah to cover up a big tech secret. Komla had once owned a company, Compatibility, with his former lover, Lucinda. Together, they had designed a matchmaking site that used bots to verify the truth about users. However, they broke up and sold their company to Soulmate, where Lucinda still worked. She had continued to develop bots for Soulmate and had introduced a new technology called Tilt that would inspire users to become more like the people they promised to be in their profiles. At first, the trio believes that Komla killed Sarah because he realized she was investigating the bots. However, they soon realize that Lucinda Clay is the true murderer—and Komla is only guilty of hiding from the truth.

They approach Komla and he admits this is true, then promises to help them catch Lucinda. They go to a gala where she is being given an award and Komla records her confession. Afterwards, he signs Veracity over to Claudia, Becks, and Squirrel so it can continue operating in secrecy. He goes to the police with the recording, but then both him and Lucinda disappear. In the end, Claudia learns that a man who worked with Lucinda at Soulmate had died under mysterious circumstances. She texts Beck, and the two make plans to investigate the case the following day.