Crime reporter Henry K. Lee’s new “murder mystery” novel, “Presumed Dead,” reads less like a murder mystery and more like a report. A very, very long report.

Contrary to its advertising claims, it also reads very little as the thriller it purports itself to be, with a near-obvious end (that you can guess from the beginning), lacking suspense and deficient of any – ahem – mystery. The “murder” part is true, anyway.

Lee’s novel, released just last month, covers the real-life events leading up to and including the murder trial of Hans Thomas Reiser, a Bay Area native and UC Berkeley graduate. He single-handedly embodies the idea of computer geeks and CS majors as potentially autistic, asocial egomaniacs and – spoiler! (not really) – wife-killing sociopaths. Creator of the self-proclaimed world’s fastest computer filing system, ReiserFS, and accepted into Berkeley at only age 15, he is indisputably a genius, of the crazy-plotting-murder-genius kind.

The novel follows the disappearance and murder – Or did she run away? Or was she part of the KGB? Or? OR?- of Hans Reiser’s estranged ex-wife, Nina Reiser, a Russian doctor who reportedly met him through a Russian mail-order catalogue. They fell in love, she got pregnant (chronology under dispute), had a crazy wedding and moved to Oakland. It’s a telling sign of true love when the pre-nup stipulates that the wife must have children. And it’s certainly no indication of a doomed marriage when the groom states that she must “give up everything else.”

Amid an acrimonious divorce dealing with their children and Hans’ allegations that his wife suffered from Munchausen-by-proxy disorder and was over-diagnosing their children, Nina disappeared. The search-and-rescue turned search-and-recover process failed to locate a body, but instead revealed a scandalous past for the – by-all-accounts – great mother who searched Craigslist ads for sexual encounters and whose adulterous relationships included those with a jealous lover – whose ex-wife was nearly identical to Nina, and Hans’ former best friend – an S&M aficionado.

A writer for the Chronicle, Henry K. Lee has been a crime reporter in the Bay Area for 18 years. He began compiling the material for the novel during the Reiser murder trial, liveblogging the proceedings at www.sfgate.com/ZBLS. It was suggested by fans of the blog that he write a book. The thing is, unless you thrive in the tedious, you might be better off not reading it.

The novel is impressively well researched, though sometimes to its detriment, as Lee delves into tangents that relate the history of almost each individual and location. Often serving to weigh down the narrative and impede its flow, the excess material is of little interest and minimal importance. Lee’s descriptive powers, too, rely heavily on recitation and a brand of tell-don’t-show, both of which fail to capture a palpable, dynamic setting within “Dead”: “Nina wore a black-and-white sundress, a necklace with a blue stone and flip-flops. Rory had on a green shirt, and his sister … was wearing a yellow dress,” Lee writes.

Though it seems that the material is presented in full – it’s 445 pages long – the handling of it isn’t very objective, as the author’s description treats Nina with a gilded pen and Hans with tangible disdain. A multiplicity of noun-verb sentence structures plagues the novel, and the read gets tired quickly as the material fumbles in a deluge of minute details and un-varied construction. The writing is often repetitious and fumbles in details of little interest while it repeats itself; it often makes the same point multiple times again and again, repeating itself over and over.

“What would it mean if these crimes were just swept under the rug?” Lee asks in his foreword. “What if nobody cared? What if victims weren’t given a voice, an opportunity – sometimes from the grave – to be heard?” The questions are relevant, and the novel a testimony to the potency of crime reporting. But while Lee may be an adept reporter, he’s no novelist, and his narrative writing style is proof of an accomplished journalist who simply cannot provide a compelling account. The strength of “Presumed Dead” is based only on the riveting nature of the facts, and not Lee’s writing skill.

So what if nobody cared? Too long, too detailed and sometimes too boring, the book may be better “swept under the rug” itself.