Don't Drive Left Lane in Alexandria

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Erick Harris

Pete Reilly chose 1973 for a reason. Not 1968, when everything was visibly on fire. Not 1975, when the last helicopter lifted off from Saigon. But 1973, that strange suspended summer when Watergate was unraveling on television every day, when the war was technically winding down but nobody's brother had come home yet, when the country was in the middle of becoming something different without quite knowing what. That specific moment, rendered through the specific streets of Alexandria, Virginia, is what makes this novel feel so genuinely inhabited.

Cowboy Murphy is the kind of protagonist who earns your affection before he does anything particularly remarkable. He is seventeen and his world is basketball courts and friendships and the first terrifying approach of love, and Pete Reilly respects that world enough to render it with full seriousness. The coming-of-age framework is not decorative here. It is the point. Because what Cowboy is coming of age into is exactly the America that the Watergate hearings and Roe v. Wade and the gas shortages and the missing Vietnam brother are quietly reshaping around him, and he has to figure out who he is inside all of that without a map.

The wrongful death lawsuit that connects two families across Alexandria's social and racial lines is the novel's structural spine, and it is shrewdly chosen. Legal proceedings have a way of forcing people into proximity who would otherwise never sit in the same room, and Reilly uses that proximity to explore the cultural tensions of the era with a naturalness that purely thematic approaches rarely manage. Attorney Scott Jacob and the Murphy family do not represent opposing ideologies. They are people, caught in something larger than themselves, trying to figure out what they owe each other.

The 1970s soundtrack running through the novel is not nostalgia for its own sake. Music in this book functions the way it functioned for that generation: as the thing that held the emotional truth of the moment when the official language of the culture couldn't quite get there.

For readers who lived through that summer and for those who have only inherited its consequences, this novel is a beautifully rendered reminder of how much was being decided and how little anyone knew it at the time.

About the Author

Pete Reilly

Pete Reilly is a nationally recognized CPA who has retired from public practice and managing the firm Councilor, Buchanan & Mitchell after forty five years of service. He specialized in acquisitions of accounting practices and international fraud discovery. He has completed the 4.4 mile Great Chesapeake Bay swim twenty three times and is happiest fly fishing anywhere in the Indian Ocean. Enjoys spending time with his wife Crissy and their three grown children and families. We all still miss our beloved yellow labs deeply.