The Best of Friends

Kendra, one of the novel’s three first-person narrators, is an upper-middle-class suburban mother. She has settled into a long-anticipated date night with her husband, Paul. With their two sons occupied—16-year-old Sawyer at a friend’s house for a sleepover and 14-year-old Reese in his bedroom—Kendra and Paul look forward to an evening of television and sex. Their idyll is broken by a couple of loud detonations, about a minute apart, which they think must be fireworks at the Village, their gated community’s outdoor mall. But when they hear police sirens, they leap to their feet, thinking of Sawyer, who’s at a house on the street behind theirs. Ignoring Paul’s protests, Kendra dashes out into the night to check on Sawyer, but finds her way blocked by police and SWAT officers, who have surrounded the house of Sawyer’s friend, Caleb Schultz. Cutting through a neighbor’s yard, Kendra tries to approach the house from the back but is forcibly restrained by an officer, whose walkie-talkie announces that a coroner has just been summoned to the scene.

Two weeks later—one day after Sawyer’s funeral—Kendra’s close friend Lindsey (the novel’s second narrator) fumes over the Schultzes’ recent decision to hire a lawyer.