Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patrick Cottrell

Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. Shes accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helens adoptive brother is dead. According to the internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for the abyss. Helen also knows that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brothers few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive.

Possibly my favourite unreliable narrator to date — so completely fucked up and hilarious and moving, I couldn't get enough of her voice and her weird filter.

I fear that saying any more than that would spoil this delightful book. My #1 release of 2017 so far and it will be very hard to dethrone.

I'll never be able to think of “the abyss” again without laughing.

At 32 Helen Moran is Korean born, American adoptee barely living in New York. She's inexplicably a counsellor for troubled youth where she may or may not be under investigation.

She gets a call that her non-biological, but also Korean, adopted brother has committed suicide. It's not her adoptive parents that make the call, and even when she arrives at her childhood home in Milwaukee her parents seem almost surprised by her arrival and are on edge the entire time. She hasn't talked to them in 5 years and it seems everyone would have been completely fine if that had gone on for another 5.

Meanwhile Helen is sleuthing around her old home town to try and decipher why her brother killed himself with all the nuance of a 12 year old storybook sleuth. It's a weird and disjointed read. People float in and out of Helen's narrative. Later in the book we find Helen's brother wondering whether she's bipolar or schizophrenic. We're seeing the world through her eyes and it's off kilter and meandering filled with jarring affectations and sneaky contradictions. The writing proved elusive to me and I just never made a connection.