The Archivist

Archivist Emily Snow, the 27-year-old heroine of this verbose, melodramatic murder mystery from Pickett (Sideways), is hired by Regents University’s Memorial Library in San Diego, Calif., to finish cataloging the work of Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Raymond West after the death of her predecessor, Nadia Fontaine, in a surfing accident nine months earlier. When a computer search turns up a “dark archive” (“a digital cosmology containing anything and everything that for reasons of privacy should be undiscoverable by the public road map of the finding aid”) containing a detailed account of an affair between Raymond and Nadia, Emily begins to wonder about the unusual circumstances surrounding Nadia’s death and takes it upon herself to investigate. Meanwhile, the plan of Raymond’s heiress wife to donate $25 million to the library and the possibility Raymond will win the Nobel Prize for Literature complicate her efforts to discover the truth. Pickett raises serious questions about the cult of the writer and the ethics around preserving an artist’s work for posterity, but overwrought descriptions, a plot slowed by too many points of view, and a lack of suspense make this a slog. Genre readers can safely take a pass. (Nov.)