That long-ago night he was so out of his mind that his best friend had to pull a gun on him to make him go away? A visit to the friend twenty years later reveals that Carr was pointing the gun.

His lucrative side business as a cocaine dealer? Not all that lucrative, as it turned out, and filled with peril.

His belief that after his twins were born, he quickly sobered up to become a parent? Nice story, if he could prove it.

The notion that he was an easy choice as a custodial parent once he finally was sober? His lawyer pulls out the old file and gently explains it was a little more complicated than that.

In one sense, the story of The Night of the Gun is a common one -- a white-boy misdemeanant lands in a ditch and is restored to sanity through the love of his family, a God of his understanding, and a support group that will go unnamed. But when the whole truth is told, it does not end there. After fourteen years -- or was it thirteen? -- Carr tried an experiment in social drinking. Double jeopardy turned out to be a game he did not play well. As a reporter and columnist at the nation's best newspaper, he prospered, but gained no more adeptness at mood-altering substances. He set out to become a nice suburban alcoholic and succeeded all too well, including two more arrests, one that included a night in jail wearing a tuxedo.

Ferocious and eloquent, courageous and bitingly funny, The Night of the Gun unravels the ways memory helps us not only create our lives, but survive them.

"... a superior work of philosophy that tells a unique and insightful story about narrative." -- Quarterly Journal of Speech

The killer wants Jay to be the one that finds him. Not so he can be stopped, but so he can make the detective his final victim. Every clue brings Jay closer to ending the case or his own life.