4 Mysteries Shot Through With Malice and Grief

The Rivals

By Jane Pek

Pek’s debut “The Verifiers” was the book I most wanted to review in 2022, but didn’t. It wasn’t perfect, but I admired the fresh, sweetly sardonic voice of the amateur sleuth and mystery-novel aficionado Claudia Lin, as well as the way Pek raised questions about living, dating and lying online.

THE RIVALS (Vintage, 401 pp., paperback, $18) sees Claudia co-running Veracity, “an online-dating detective agency sussing out whether the people … on matching platforms are lying about themselves.” As she spars will-they-won’t-they-style with her business partner, Becks, and contends with her fractious family, Claudia grows increasingly alarmed at the cutthroat tactics of the matchmakers used by some of Veracity’s clients.

When one of those clients dies in a suspicious bike accident, Claudia tracks down his ex, who’s employed by one of the aforementioned matchmakers, and convinces him to play double agent. Suddenly Claudia’s in a spy story, and so are readers, which allows Pek to have as much fun with genre tropes as she did in “The Rivals.” But beneath structural trickery and energetic prose lies the beating heart of human connection.

Buried Road

By Katie Tallo

Each mystery series installment is supposed to stand alone, to give new readers a starting point no matter which book they pick up first, but in truth this happens far less often than it should.

But you don’t need to have read the first two books in Tallo’s wonderful series (“Dark August” and “Poisoned Lilies”) to enjoy BURIED ROAD (Harper, 327 pp., paperback $18.99).