I agree that the double-blind narrator approach was more trouble than it was worth. I appreciated TP's verification of real-world documents and facts in the early going, as it felt like Frost playing fair with the audience (preventing this from becoming a Dan Brown book, with interesting historical facts being hopelessly intertwined with conjecture). However, once she starts getting chattier, she comes as across as vastly incompetent, and her attempts at humor are both inappropriate in this setting and not particularly funny. She rarely gives the reader any information that we couldn't have gleaned on our own with a quick Google or simply by connecting the dots that the Archivist gave us -- honestly, some of her interjections felt a trifle insulting, as if Frost didn't trust us to figure certain things out.AgentCoop wrote:I've sort of been wondering why TP is in the book at all. I'm not being flippant. What I mean is: What function does this character perform in the story? What's Frost using her to accomplish? At first I thought she was an authority figure for the audience to trust (i.e. "TP verifies this document, so I can trust that it's authentic"), but then she signs off on things that we KNOW are wrong. So I don't quite get where Frost was going with TP.
Plus, Frost at times accidentally had the Archivist referring back to things that *TP* had said a page earlier (I'm sure someone already has some elaborate conspiracy theory on how this wasn't an error, but instead, Doppelcoop, after editing the dossier, got a sex change and rejoined the FBI as TP with the sole purpose of screwing around with the dossier even more! ).
Finally, withholding the identities of both the Archivist AND TP until the end seems silly, especially since TP's name has no significance to us whatsoever.