The Best of Friends

The title of this novel is doing a lot of work. Lindsey, Kendra, and Dani have been best friends since fourth grade. They live in the same wealthy Southern California gated community. Their sons play soccer together. They know each other's coffee orders, marriages, and bad habits, or they think they do. Then a night of teenage drinking ends with two gunshots, and the three women discover how little they actually know about their children or each other.

Lucinda Berry's 2020 novel opens with the shooting. Sawyer is dead. Jacob is in a coma with a gunshot wound to the head. Caleb is physically unharmed but has stopped speaking. The boys were at a fraternity party, came home drunk and high, and continued the night at Caleb's house. Sawyer and Jacob were sixteen. Caleb is the same age. The police have a gun, a locked room, and no clear story. The reader knows the outcome before the characters do, which makes the book less of a whodunit and more of an autopsy of a friendship.

The three mothers narrate in alternating chapters. Kendra is Sawyer's mother. She is grieving and furious, and she starts looking for someone to blame. Lindsey is Jacob's mother. She refuses to accept that her son is brain-dead and spends her days at the hospital, then brings him home when the insurance runs out. Dani is Caleb's mother. She is married to Bryan, a controlling, abusive man who cares more about legal strategy than about his son's silence. Each woman has a version of the truth, and each version protects her own child.

The night

The details of the night come out slowly. The boys were at a party. Luna, Caleb's sister, drove them home because they were too drunk to drive. They went to Caleb's house and stayed up. Then two shots, a minute or two apart. Sawyer was hit in the abdomen. Jacob was hit in the head. Caleb was in the house and was not hurt.

The investigation is run by Detective Martin Locke. He has very little to work with. Sawyer is dead, Jacob cannot speak, and Caleb will not. The mothers fill the silence with theories. Kendra thinks Jacob shot Sawyer and then himself, because Jacob was jealous or unstable. Lindsey thinks it was an accident. Dani thinks her son is a victim of something she cannot name. The theories say more about the mothers than about the boys.

Kendra's grief is not clean. She neglects her younger son, Reese, and she searches Sawyer's room for clues. She also has a secret. She has been giving Reese her own Adderall for more than a year, against her husband Paul's wishes. She wanted Reese to do better in school. Reese has been selling the pills to classmates. The revelation matters because the toxicology report shows all three boys had drugs in their systems: marijuana, alcohol, and Adderall. The adults' attempts to manage their children's futures have fed directly into the disaster.

The burner phone

Kendra finds a burner phone hidden in Sawyer's room. It contains months of texts between Sawyer and Jacob. The messages describe a secret sexual and romantic relationship. Jacob wanted to be open. Sawyer refused. He was afraid of being seen as gay, and he took that fear out on Jacob, flirting with girls and saying cruel things. The texts reframe everything the mothers thought they knew. The boys were not rivals. They were lovers, and the relationship was falling apart under the pressure of secrecy.

Kendra reads the messages and decides they prove Jacob killed Sawyer. She takes them to Lindsey. The confrontation is brutal. Two women who have known each other since childhood scream at each other over a hospital bed and a dead boy. Lindsey insists the shooting was an accident. Kendra insists Jacob was jealous and violent. The friendship cracks down the middle.

The burner phone is a clever device because it gives the reader the truth in fragments. The texts are not a confession. They are a record of two scared teenagers trying to love each other in a place where being gay is still a weapon. Sawyer's cruelty is not proof that he deserved to die. It is proof that he was suffering. The novel is good at showing how fear turns into cruelty, and how cruelty can look like a motive to people who are desperate for one.

The mothers' secrets

The adult plot is a catalogue of hidden lives. Lindsey's husband Andrew is emotionally and perhaps romantically involved with another woman. Dani's husband Bryan is a drunk and a bully who controls the money and the family's decisions. Kendra's marriage to Paul is strained by the Adderall secret and by grief. The three women have spent years presenting stable families to each other, and the crisis exposes the performances.

Dani leaves Bryan and takes Caleb to her mother's house. She hopes that distance from his father will help Caleb speak. Bryan focuses on the gun, the law, and the question of who is to blame. He is not wrong to think about legal consequences, but he is wrong to treat his son as a case rather than a child. Dani begins to see how much of her life has been organized around avoiding his anger.

Lindsey's story is the hardest to read. She refuses to let Jacob go. She brings him home and sets up a place for him in the living room. She talks to him, reads to him, and holds his hand. The novel does not make her delusional. It makes her a mother who cannot accept the medical facts, and it lets her grief be ugly and stubborn. When she finally accepts that Jacob is not coming back, she tells him that Sawyer is waiting. He dies shortly afterward. The scene is quiet and devastating. It does not claim that Sawyer actually hears her. It shows that Lindsey needs to say it.

Caleb's confession

Caleb breaks his silence when the mothers' argument becomes too much. He says Sawyer and Jacob had been fighting for weeks but would not tell him why. He felt excluded and angry. Then he tells the rest.

On the night of the shooting, the boys were high and drunk. Sawyer accused Caleb and Jacob of treating him like a homophobic slur. He threatened to rape Caleb's sister, Luna. The threat is grotesque and deliberate. Sawyer was trying to hurt Caleb in the worst way he could think of, and he succeeded. Caleb got his father's gun. He did not plan to kill Sawyer. He wanted to scare him. He pressed the gun against Sawyer's stomach. Sawyer taunted him, saying he did not have the courage to use it. The gun went off.

Caleb tried to stop the bleeding with a pillow. Jacob saw that Sawyer was dying. He took the gun and shot himself in the head. That is the sequence. Caleb caused Sawyer's fatal wound, but it was an accidental discharge during a threat, not a premeditated murder. Jacob's self-inflicted wound explains the coma and the death that follows.

Caleb confesses and agrees to turn himself in. Dani drives him to the police station. The confession gives the mothers the truth they have been demanding, but it does not fix anything. Sawyer is still dead. Jacob is still dying. Caleb is still a boy who brought a gun to a fight and killed his friend. The legal consequences are left open. The novel is more interested in the moral ones.

The epilogue

Two weeks later, Bryan has hired a cutthroat lawyer and obtained temporary custody of Caleb. The lawyer plans to shift responsibility onto Kendra and Paul by emphasizing their liquor, Reese's Adderall dealing, and the boys' intoxication. Caleb is consumed by guilt and wants to be punished. The novel does not give a verdict or a sentence. It leaves the case hanging, which is frustrating if you want closure and honest if you think about how real cases drag on.

Kendra starts attending spiritualist groups, trying to contact Sawyer. Dani finds it sad and a little unsettling. The spiritualism is not confirmed as real. It is a grief behavior, a way for Kendra to keep talking to her son. The novel treats it gently.

Then comes the final twist. Dani has been corresponding anonymously for years with a married man through a website for married people seeking friendship or companionship. She plans to end the correspondence now that she has left Bryan. The man is Andrew, Lindsey's husband. Dani and Andrew have not knowingly identified each other. The coincidence is the last shock, and the book does not resolve it. We do not know if they discover each other, if Lindsey finds out, or what happens to the marriages.

Part of what makes the novel sting is the setting. The families live behind a gate, in houses with pools and extra rooms, and they have spent years telling themselves that their money and their closeness protect their children. The gate does not keep anything out. The boys buy drugs at school. The parents hide affairs and drinking and pills. The community's idea of safety is a performance, and the novel is interested in how much energy goes into maintaining it. When the performance cracks, the mothers do not become strangers. They become people who have to look at what they were pretending not to see.

The boys are also trapped by that performance. Sawyer and Jacob cannot be open about their relationship, so they hide it in texts and lies. Caleb cannot tell his mother what is happening in his house, because his father's anger fills the rooms. The adults think the boys are secretive in the way teenagers are secretive. The truth is that the boys are protecting themselves from the adults' judgments, and the adults have given them good reason to. That is the tragedy the novel circles: not a single bad decision, but a whole environment in which honesty feels more dangerous than silence.

What the book is doing

The Best of Friends is about the gap between the stories parents tell about their children and the lives those children are actually living. The mothers are not villains. They are women who love their sons and have convinced themselves that love means knowing. The novel shows how that confidence becomes a liability. Kendra's Adderall, Bryan's gun, Andrew's affair, Dani's anonymous correspondence: every adult has a secret that shapes the night without being the cause of it.

The structure is effective. Announcing the outcome early removes the suspense of who died and replaces it with the suspense of why. The alternating narrators create dramatic irony. The reader learns things each mother does not know, and watches them make accusations from partial evidence. The voices are not always distinct. Several reviewers have noted that the three women sound similar, and that is a fair criticism. The chapters are labeled, but the tone does not change much.

The novel also has a problem with its final twist. The Andrew reveal is a coincidence that arrives after the emotional story is already resolved. It feels like a hook for a sequel or a book club argument rather than an organic part of the plot. The same is true of some of the legal threads. The epilogue raises questions it does not answer, which can feel unfinished.

What works is the raw, unglamorous portrayal of grief and guilt. Lindsey's refusal to let Jacob go. Kendra's search of Sawyer's room. Dani's slow recognition of her husband's control. Caleb's confession, which is terrifying because it sounds like a real teenager trying to explain a moment he cannot fully believe he lived through. The novel understands that tragedy is rarely caused by one person. It is caused by a chain of secrets, failures, and small decisions that no one sees as a chain until it is too late.

I would recommend The Best of Friends to readers who like domestic suspense with complicated women and morally messy endings. It is not a comfortable book. It is a book about the cost of pretending, and it earns its discomfort.