The Grand Complication: A Novel Book

I'm a sucker of fiction in which a main character is a librarian -- that's how I ended up with this book.

The story sounded promising: a librarian who does research independently as a side job takes on the task of figuring out the meaning behind a collection of items that belonged to an 18th Century inventor for a wealthy (how convenient), eccentric client who is a bit of a mystery himself. There's also a kind of anti-love story goin on, and while parts of it are interesting, basically what's happening is that our hero-librarian's marriage is falling apart.

It is because of those passages in which he whines about his wife that I give this book low rating. Frequently, I felt he was bringing the demise of marriage on himself anyway. The bad-marriage subplot didn't really add anything to the overall story for me, and it had the added disadvantage of making the protagonist annoying and unlikeable.

I have not read the author's previous work. Since this story supposedly builds on a previous novel (A Case of Curiosities), perhaps that would have made a difference in my appreciation of the bad-marriage subplot.