I spied this book on a display at J. Michaels Books in Eugene, Oregon, and this is the thing about a really excellent indie bookstore: their overall stock was so well curated, and the displays so thoughtfully put together, that I wanted to buy everything, because I knew that humans with excellent taste had consciously chosen to put it there. I don’t read mysteries all that often, but a story about a queer Asian American “lifelong mystery reader who wrote her senior thesis on Jane Austen” and gets a job working for an agency that verifies identities of people using online dating sites? I will read that.
Early on in the novel, Claudia, the intrepid detective, muses to herself about the difference between fictional characters and actual people, or rather, the view of actual people that you get from their online dating profile. I was like, YES. This is my JAM. Inject it straight into my veins. Unfortunately, the author of this book is not actually a novel theorist who is interested in form and character (she’s a lawyer). So she (or perhaps her editor at Penguin) didn’t want to venture too far down that rabbit hole, which, fair. But it does open onto what I suspect is a struggle this book will have, namely, that it’s an uneasy blend of genre fiction and intellectual content. Relax, I’m not saying that mysteries can’t be highbrow or intellectual — we all know they can. But there is a balancing act involved, where some readers will get annoyed by how much time you’re spending developing the idea of AI or whatever and want you to get back to the murder stuff, and others (like me) will want MORE of the ideas. I sort of suspect that an editor at a smaller press might be better at helping an author find a more effective balance, but that’s of course mere speculation.
But there’s SO much potential here for a really fascinating exploration of the nature of identity! And the novel is definitely doing some of it, particularly in the blend of mystery plotting and family scenes, which are quite skillfully interwoven. There’s something especially fascinating about the way race is represented, which feeds into these larger questions about public and private identity — it’s significant to me that twice, we learn a character’s race well after we’ve met them, such that it likely comes as a surprise, and at another moment, Claudia meets someone and says that he likely passes as white but she suspects he’s hapa. I want to pull more on that thread and think about how the novel plays with the idea of race and visibility in relation to the kind of information we get about people from novels versus dating apps versus interactions (anyone want an essay on that topic, hit me up).
I was so caught up in all of that stuff that I honestly sort of forgot about the murder mystery part. But the novel also sort of interestingly subverts some of the standard tropes of mystery plotting, even as it playfully indulges others in a winking, meta kind of way.
All in all, a very entertaining airplane read.
Kasia Reads 