A review by redur
The Verifiers by Jane Pek

adventurous funny lighthearted mysterious reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

A very good book that illustrates a very real problem: constant surveillance. It's interesting how that complete violation of privacy and consent gets so smoothed over with a fun-toned cozy mystery and leaves the moral quandary up to the reader.
It feels on purpose, like the way it hand waves the deep family trauma as well. The book touches on really dark material that people really suffer with but in a way that tries its best to ignore it, much like Claudia must do to just get through the day.
It's like a pop song that has a danceable melody with really dark and troubling lyrics.

Claudia is *not* a good person but seems to justify her use of total surveillance technology by using it for "good". She also goes on to
break and enter and steal "for good", justifying those crimes and violations of privacy and autonomy as well. I'm interested to see how far Claudia continues to slide down this slippery slope of vigilantism in future stories and whether the author will show these moral failings with anything other than ignoring it. And whether Claudia can reckon with what she is doing.
And then everything is happy in the end with all the means justified.

We certainly have real world examples of this, so it's certainly something to keep on your radar.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ads-to-find-targets-and-vladimir-putin/
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