Jane Pek Books in Order

Jane Pek was born and grew up in Singapore, then built a life that has taken her through history classes, law school, corporate work, and fiction workshops. Her path to publishing wasn’t a straight line, which fits the questions her novels like to ask about the lives people present to the world and the messier truths underneath.

Reading came early. Pek has said that the fantasy books she read as a child made her want to write sprawling fantasies of her own, even if the books she eventually published took a different route. That early love of story still shows up in her work through sharp plotting, playful genre references, and characters who are themselves devoted readers.

She studied history at Yale University, then earned a law degree from New York University School of Law. Law became a major part of her working life, but writing stayed in the picture. Pek has described it as the activity that remained constant for her, apart from the especially demanding stretch of law school.

After working in corporate law, she spent a year back in Singapore and completed an MFA in Fiction at Brooklyn College. It was a practical as well as creative turning point. Near the end of the program, concerned about financial stability, she returned to legal work and later became in-house counsel at a global investment company in New York.

Before her novels, Pek published short fiction in outlets including The Brooklyn Review, Witness, and Conjunctions. Her work was selected twice for The Best American Short Stories. Those shorter pieces gave her room to test ideas about technology, identity, relationships, and the strange stories people tell themselves about who they are.

Then came The Verifiers in 2022. The novel introduces Claudia Lin, an underemployed New Yorker and lifelong mystery fan who is recruited by a discreet dating detective agency. When a client vanishes, Claudia’s wish for a clever, bookish investigation turns into a case involving corporate secrecy, online identities, and the complicated expectations within her Chinese American family.

Pek’s mysteries use modern tools without treating technology as background wallpaper. Dating apps, algorithms, data, and social media affect how her characters date, work, hide, and make assumptions about one another. At the center, though, are people trying to be known by others without giving up control of themselves.

The Rivals returns to Claudia and her colleagues at Veracity, taking the series into AI, corporate surveillance, and spy-story territory. Claudia remains an observant, funny guide through the chaos, but the books also make room for her family ties, romantic uncertainty, and deep affection for the mysteries that taught her how a case is supposed to work.

Pek lives in New York and works as a lawyer at a global investment company. Her two novels so far make a neat place to start for readers who enjoy contemporary mysteries with real-world tech problems, family friction, and a detective who knows the genre rules well enough to worry when life stops following them.