A November Book Pick from The New York Times
When archivist Nadia Fontaine is found dead of an apparent drowning, Emily Snow is hired by Regents University to finish the job she started--to organize and process the papers of Raymond West, a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has been short-listed for the Nobel.
Emily's job comes with its inherent pressures. West's wife, Elizabeth, is an heiress who's about to donate $25 million to the Memorial Library--an eight-story architectural marvel that is the crown jewel of the university. The inaugural event in just a few months will be a gala for the who's who of San Diego to celebrate the unveiling of the Raymond West Collection and the financial gift that made it all possible.
As Emily sets to work on the West papers, it begins to dawn on her that several items have gone missing from the collection. To trace their whereabouts, she gains unsupervised access to the highly restricted "dark archives," in which she opens a Pandora's box of erotically and intellectually charged correspondence between Raymond West and the late Nadia Fontaine. Through their archived emails, Emily goes back a year in time and relives the tragic trajectory of their passionate love affair. Did Nadia really drown accidentally, as the police report concluded, or could it have been suicide, or, even worse, murder? Compelled to complete the collection and find the truth, Emily unwittingly morphs into an adult Nancy Drew and a one-woman archivist crusader on a mission to right the historical record.
Twisting slowly like a tourniquet, The Archivist turns into a suspenseful murder mystery with multiple and intersecting layers. Not just a whodunit, it is also a profound meditation on love, privacy, and the ethics of destroying or preserving materials of a highly personal nature.
Pickett, Rex: -
Rex Pickett is the critically acclaimed author of the novel Sideways, which was adapted into the iconic film of the same title. Sideways was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning for Best Adapted Screenplay, among 350 other plaudits. Pickett is the author of three Sideways sequels--the IPPY Gold Medal-winning Sideways Oregon (previously published as Vertical), Sideways Chile, and now Sideways New Zealand. He is also the author of The Archivist. Pickett is currently working on a post-Sideways New Zealand trilogy. A Southern California native, the Rex Pickett Papers are currently enshrined at Geisel Library on the campus of his alma mater, the University of California San Diego.
