The Best of Friends

The Best of Friends, a 2020 suspense novel by Lucinda Berry, follows the aftermath of a mysterious shooting in a suburban gated community, which leaves a promising teenage athlete dead and another in a coma. The boys’ mothers, who were childhood friends, struggle with intense grief and feelings of rage, guilt, and recrimination, as dark secrets and old grudges bubble to the surface of their formerly perfect lives. Lucinda Berry, a former clinical psychologist and the author of over 10 novels, brings her working knowledge of psychic and domestic trauma to this suburban tragedy, which questions how well people know their friends, spouses, and even children.

This guide refers to the 2020 Thomas & Mercer paperback edition of The Best of Friends.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of sexual content, substance use, death, death by suicide, emotional abuse, physical abuse, rape, graphic violence, and antigay bias. 

Language Note: The source text uses terms that are considered hate speech related to antigay bias. This study guide reproduces this language only in quotations.

Plot Summary

Two gunshots, a minute or two apart, shatter the evening stillness of a gated suburban community. A sleepover attended by three teenage boys ends in the death of 16-year-old Sawyer, shot through the belly. Jacob, shot in the head, is taken to urgent care in a coma. Caleb, though physically unharmed, is too traumatized to speak. All three boys were on their high school soccer team, and their mothers have been best friends since the fourth grade.

In the weeks that follow, the shockwaves of the tragedy open fissures in the victims’ upper-middle-class families and in their mothers’ friendships. During the police investigation, Kendra, Sawyer’s mother, discovers that her younger son, Reese, sells the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) drug Adderall to his classmates. Lindsey, Jacob’s mother, discovers that her husband, Andrew, is romantically involved with another woman. Meanwhile, Jacob is declared braindead, and his medical insurance is cut off; nevertheless, Lindsey and Andrew cling to their hopes for his eventual recovery. Dani, Caleb’s mother, finally summons the courage to leave her abusive husband, Bryan. Taking Caleb to live with her at her mother’s house, Lindsey hopes that, in this new setting, he’ll recover enough of his mental health and memory to tell her what happened that night.

In the days after her son’s death, Kendra retreats, spending much of her time in Sawyer’s bedroom, largely ignoring her younger son, Reese. Her marriage, already destabilized by the tragedy, deteriorates further when her husband learns that she has been secretly dosing Reese with Adderall for over a year—expressly disobeying his orders not to treat Reese’s diagnosed ADHD with psychotropic drugs. Meanwhile, obsessed with finding a “clue” to the mystery of the shooting, Kendra ransacks her son’s bedroom and finds evidence of a tempestuous love affair between Sawyer and Jacob. Believing that Jacob murdered her son out of jealousy and then shot himself, Kendra shows the evidence to her two friends, nearly sparking a physical altercation with Lindsey. During this fight, Caleb breaks his long silence and confesses to shooting Sawyer.

Caleb explains that, in the weeks leading up to the shooting, Sawyer and Jacob fought constantly but would not tell him why. Finally, on the night of the sleepover, when they were under the combined influence of marijuana, Adderall, and alcohol, the tension exploded into deadly violence. In Caleb’s living room, Sawyer screamed insults at Caleb and Jacob, accusing them of treating him like a “faggot.” Sawyer threatened to rape Caleb’s sister Luna, who was not in the house. Delirious with rage, Caleb fetched his father’s gun and pressed it against Sawyer’s stomach. To his horror, the gun accidentally went off. Seeing his lover mortally wounded, Jacob seized the gun and shot himself in the head.

The three mothers realize that Sawyer and Jacob were in love, but that Sawyer was not ready for the public relationship that Jacob wanted. Sawyer tormented Jacob by flirting with girls in his presence, leading to the blowup on the night of the sleepover. As Dani drives Caleb to the police station so he can turn himself in, Kendra and Lindsey apologize to each other and try to repair their friendship. After Kendra leaves, Lindsey resigns herself to the painful truth that Jacob will never wake up. She tells Jacob that Sawyer is “waiting” for him, and within a few hours, he stops breathing.

Two weeks later, Dani is still living with her mother, and her now-estranged husband Bryan has hired a “cutthroat” lawyer to defend Caleb for killing Sawyer. The lawyer’s strategy is to shift the blame to Kendra and her husband, Paul, with the claim that their liquor and their son’s Adderall triggered the “accident.” Kendra and Paul, now united against Bryan, have mostly settled their differences. However, Dani is disturbed to hear that Kendra, hoping to contact Sawyer’s ghost, has joined a suspicious spiritualist group.

Finally, Dani reveals to the reader that for two years, she has been communicating anonymously with a married man and has become very close to him. Now that she’s separated from her abusive husband and no longer needs the man’s emotional support, she plans to end the relationship. Unbeknownst to her, the man she has been writing to is Lindsey’s husband Andrew, who has fallen in love with her without knowing her true identity.