Fairly Certain

FAIRLY CERTAIN

Some road trips change your life. Most of them do it gradually - a wrong turn here, a flat tire there, a late-night conversation at a diner that shifts something in you. Tommy Ferraro and Pete Kowalski's road trip changed their lives in approximately three minutes. That's how long Tommy was in the bathroom at Ricky's Fuel & Go in Beecham, Alabama, population 4,200, while the rest of his future was being rearranged without his knowledge or consent.

Tommy Ferraro is twenty-two, a supply chain management major at Rutgers, and exactly the kind of guy who pays his speeding tickets immediately and feels guilty about them for weeks. Pete Kowalski is his best friend and road-trip co-pilot - a man who has been quietly catastrophizing since the fourth grade and sees no reason to stop now. They were supposed to be passing through Alabama. Nobody passes through Alabama on purpose. This is something they will have considerable time to reflect on.

Because when Tommy walks out of that gas station bathroom, a man is bleeding on the floor, a woman is screaming, and every survival instinct Tommy possesses tells him to run. So he runs. He also, in a moment his brain will spend years trying to explain, grabs two bottles of water off the counter on the way out - because he'd mentally paid for them, and his brain was simply not at full capacity. Pete drives. The blue lights appear one mile later. And just like that, two kids from New Jersey find themselves in a Beecham County holding cell, charged with robbery and murder.

Enter Vincent "Vinnie" Calabrese, Tommy's cousin and the only lawyer in the family - a credential that sounds more impressive before you've seen Vinnie in action. Vinnie practices out of a strip mall in Parsippany. He's never tried a murder case. He's never tried anything in Alabama. He's also deeply, genuinely uncertain about most aspects of courtroom procedure, a quality he masks with spectacular confidence and hand gestures that the judge will describe, in her notes, as "theatrical to the point of distraction." Vinnie is, in other words, exactly the attorney you get when you call your mother from a holding cell in rural Alabama at midnight.

What unfolds is a courtroom spectacle that Beecham County will be talking about for a generation - a collision of Jersey attitude and Southern jurisdiction, of a good-natured jury and a baffled judge, of security footage that looks worse than it is and a defense strategy that is, at best, optimistic. Tommy and Pete, who have been best friends since the third grade, will discover exactly how well they know each other when they're in separate cells. The woman behind the counter at Ricky's has opinions. Dale Richter's family has more. And the man in the gray hoodie is, as Vinnie will argue with great passion and limited evidence, absolutely somebody else's problem.

Fairly Certain is a comic novel about the spectacular unfairness of wrong place, wrong time - and the even more spectacular unfairness of having Vinnie Calabrese as your only line of defense. It's about friendship under pressure, about small towns and big misunderstandings, about the gap between what actually happened and what it looks like happened, and about the particular helplessness of being twenty-two years old and completely innocent in a jurisdiction that has never heard of you.

It's also, at its heart, about two kids from Jersey who should have just used a bottle.

For fans of Carl Hiaasen, David Sedaris, and anyone who has ever made a perfectly reasonable decision that looked absolutely terrible in retrospect.