The Deepest Readers Do Not Make the Best Detectives 

Patrick Cottrell’s second novel Afternoon Hours of a Hermit begins with a mysterious envelope delivered in the mail; inside is a childhood photograph of the narrator’s deceased brother, sent just as the fifth anniversary of his suicide approaches. It is the kind of inciting incident that carries all the scaffolding of a detective story—a mystery to be solved, a past event reopened under the promise of yielding not just new information but some deeper understanding. However, this is not your typical detective novel: Cottrell resists the genre’s usual pleasures of discovery and resolution; questions are left unanswered, and the truth is partial or ambiguous, if it’s uncovered at all. 

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