A suspense thriller with a busy plot....

I enjoyed the storyline and the fact that it wasn't predictable - kept me guessing until the end as to what had happened on the night that triggered the start of the book.
The differing point of views are interesting as the reader is given an insight into the individual emotions/pain of each Mother, and the intricacies of their complex relationships with one another. However, the jumps between the different points of view were too frequent and poorly linked...it took a long time to read the book and be able to keep up with who is married to who and who is the mother of who, which made it hard work at times. There was a lot going on for each of the characters too, which again made the book interesting but there was a lot to keep up with!

The Best Of Friends follows three women who have been best friends since school.
Now they’re adults and their sons are best friends. One night, something terrible happens leaving one of their sons dead, one in a coma and one who is almost catatonic.

Throughout the book, as it changes point of view - you will unravel the different women’s lives, their marriages and family and what could have possibly happened that night.

I liked how you got to know each character and felt they were very well developed and real.

This was not a feel good book with a happy ending. There were good parts but it really was sad and heartfelt.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC. I fully enjoyed.

This was a gripping, emotional story. Friendships torn apart, tragedy, and secrets, so many secrets. Tragedy changes lives forever and these friends will never be the same. I loved the writing style and found the book hard to put down. I will be seeking more of this author’s work. Five emotional ⭐️ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Many thanks to Thomas & Mercer and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

EXCERPT: 'You can't go out there!' Paul yells.

'What if there's a crazy shooter?' Reese asks at the same time.

I ignore them and step outside before shutting the door tightly behind me. Three police cars race down the street and make a left at the corner just like all the others. I take off running. People are coming out of their houses, milling down the street while I sprint past them.

'Dear God, please don't let anything happen to my baby.'

ABOUT THIS BOOK: Best friends Lindsey, Kendra, and Dani endure every parent’s nightmare when a tragic accident befalls their teenage boys, leaving one dead, another in a coma, and a third too traumatized to speak.

Reeling from the worst night of their lives, the three mothers plunge into a desperate investigation of the bizarre incident. How could something so horrible happen in their wealthy Southern California suburb?

They soon discover that the accident was just the beginning, and troubling discoveries lead to chilling questions: Do they really know their children? Do they even know each other? As more secrets surface, a fog of doubt and suspicion threatens to poison their families, their friendships, and the whole community.

With the illusion of happiness and safety long gone, these women must now confront the hazards of heartbreak, the consequences of jealousy, and the dangers of living double lives.

MY THOUGHTS: I failed to become invested in The Best of Friends by Lucinda Berry. I have read this author previously, and really enjoyed her work, but this just left me cold. For a short novel, this felt inordinately long!

The characters were interchangeable, lacked definition, and I had difficulty in remembering what children belonged to which parents.

The chapters are narrated by the mothers of the children, Dani, Kendra and Lindsey. But it was easy to forget who was narrating.

There really is no feeling of suspense, and there are tantalizing tidbits dropped into the narrative which are never explored or explained - the most glaring of which is an oblique reference regarding something that happened when these three were at school, but that was it. A scandal waiting to be exposed, or the possibility of one, and there's no clarification, no further reference to it. Frustrating!

Several times I thought of not finishing The Best of Friends, but I wanted to know what these three had been up to. As it is, we never find out. Disappointing, and mundane. Not at all what I expected from the author of Saving Noah, which I loved.

A lot of other readers love this book. Reading is a very personal subjective experience, and not every book is for every reader. So, if you enjoyed the extract, and the plot summary interests you, please do read Final Cut by S.J. Watson. I hope that you are one of the many who love this book.

** depressed stars

THE AUTHOR: Dr. Lucinda Berry is a former clinical psychologist and leading researcher in childhood trauma. Now, she spends her days writing full-time where she uses her clinical experience to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction. She enjoys taking her readers on a journey through the dark recesses of the human psyche.

If Berry isn’t chasing after her son, you can find her running through Los Angeles, prepping for her next marathon.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Thomas & Mercer via NetGalley for providing a digital ARC of The Best of Friends for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbooksday.wordpress.com

This review and others are also published on Twitter, Amazon, Instagram and my webpage.

The Prologue begins with the first person present tense PoV of Kendra and her husband, Paul, as they become aware that something terrible has happened at the home of Caleb, where their own son, Sawyer, has gone for a sleepover along with another friend, Jacob. The night ends in tragedy and horror, and none of the families are ever the same again.

The boys get drunk and begin to play around with the gun owned by Caleb’s dad, Bryan.

Sawyer dies on the spot, Jacob has to be rushed to the hospital, in a vegetative state, with a bullet in his brain, while Caleb has turned silent, too traumatised by the events of the night to even speak. He has taken to screaming, having nightmares and wetting his bed.

Doctors think that Jacob’s wound is self-inflicted and that he may have shot Sawyer. Detective Martin Locke is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. As he struggles with the investigation, Kendra feels driven to make her own investigations to find out what happened that night.

Prior to this, the families have socialised together. But tragedy draws invisible lines between them, even though on the surface, it seems that the friendship is unmarked. Soon other secrets simmer to the surface, secrets that let up to the tragedy that bound their families together. The secrets range from the abuse of drugs and peddling them, to violence and cruelty in a marriage and even an emotional affair that threatens to upend a marriage. Even the boys, it turns out, weren’t as innocent as their parents supposed.

As the secrets pop out, the face of a picture perfect life begins to crumble and the parents’ lives begin to disintegrate. Soon each woman finds herself facing overwhelming reality, as they realise the extent of the secrets they have all hidden.



The book is written in multiple first person present tense points of view of Kendra, Lindsey and Dani. The voices sound alike in the language and tone. It’s only the events taking place in each life that helps to distinguish between the characters.

The best friends in the title refers not only to Caleb, Sawyer and Jacob, who have been inseparable since grade school, but also to their mothers, Dani, Kendra and Lindsey, who have also been best friends since they were very little.

I could relate to Kendra’s sense of fear as she worries about her son and rushes out to the home of Caleb, after she hears not one but two gunshots in rapid succession. Stunned and shocked by her son’s death, Kendra gives way to grief.



The writing is prosaic. The chapters end abruptly, without a cliff-hanger or even a sense of closure to them.

I didn’t get a sense of how old the boys were until Chapter 3. I assumed that as they were having a sleepover, they were much younger. They turned out to be teenagers, at least 16 years of age.

It was hard to keep the families straight initially. Which husband was married to which wife, and who their kids were.

I found one inconsistency. In the Prologue, from Kendra’s PoV, we learn that Paul has blond hair. In Chapter 15, Dani’s PoV tells us that it is light brown, matching his perfectly tanned skin.

The book ends with a revelation on the very last word of the last chapter. There are very few books I have read that could make that claim.

Lucinda Berry is one of my auto-buy authors. She has a way of sucking you into the story right away and not allowing me to get any sleep until I finish. I really enjoyed this book but I did end up guessing the twist... this usually bugs me a lot more, but the story was so heartbreaking and I'm thankful I don't have children yet!

Okay, so this was a hard one to rate because even though it was a good emotional drama type of story, it was not a thriller in my opinion. The emotions and heartbreak the three mothers in this book had to endure was definitely shown through and through. I am interested in reading more books from this author in the future. I did like how the chapters were very short and all three mothers povs were told. It gave the story a much deeper understanding and appreciation for each character.

It was a very good story which I didn’t know how was going to pan out. I did find it hard to distinguish between the three women at first so that was a little effort. Overall it was definitely worth a read.

The Best of Friends by Lucinda Berry - publishing 01/09/2020

A sincere thank you to the publisher, author and netgalley for providing me with an ebook copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

An unthinkable tragedy forever changes a group of teens and turns family against family in this edge of your seat thriller that begs to be read in one sitting.

This isn’t a book that I would normally read but one of my friends had read it and loved it. It starts with 3 boys in an accident and 3 families questioning each other and their friendships. One of the boys dies outright but the others are not so lucky. One of them is left in an unresponsive state and the third boy is covered in blood but not willing to speak, plausibly due to the trauma. This book explores emotions and chronicles the deteriorating relationships between the three sets of parents whilst trying to understand what happened to their sons. The character were very well developed. It would be easy to identify as one of the characters in this day and age. For the most part I enjoyed it but it jumped a bit too often. I kind of lost track a bit as each chapter was by a different person and depicted each of their own journeys. As a whole, without spoiling anything, the message in the book was a strong one. Live and let live, no one has to justify their lifestyle to any other person.

I would highly recommend this book regardless of the jumping back and forwards as I think that may be a reading issue for me.

4🌟🌟🌟🌟

This book ripped my heart out right from the prologue. As a mother of a son, I just kept putting myself in each woman's shoes and my heart broke for each of them. Lucinda Berry writes with so much honesty on human interaction and friendships. Adult female relationships are so fragile and easily broken, at least from what I've experienced and sometimes it can be worse or just as bad as high school all over again. I can't imagine what it would be like to be any of the mothers in this story and I hope I never will be but damn did Lucinda write a powerful story of tragedy, trauma, and truth.

As the mother of two grown sons, the premise of this book was the stuff of nightmares for me. The event between Sawyer, Jacob, and Caleb was one of the very things I worried about when they spent time at friends' homes when they were young.

The author has weaved a story full of secrets, anger, guilt, and blame, and the reader is left wondering if anyone will emerge unscathed. The answer is no, no one can, not the parties involved, not the parents or even the siblings.

Many characters resided in this story and narrated from multiple perspectives; it may take some time to get it all straight. I was mesmerized, however, from the very beginning up until the very end. I recommend this book to anyone interested in a good whodunit or people with children. You need to read this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read The Best of Friends. I gave it four stars.

The Best Of Friends starts off with a mother’s worst nightmare...An accident involving three boys. One is dead. One is unresponsive. The third is covered in blood, refusing to speak. What exactly happened that night, no one knows.

As always, Lucinda Berry wrote an incredibly compelling thriller/mystery where you’re kept guessing until the final, solid outcome. The writing is splendid, and the characters are very easy to connect with.

The Best of Friends begins with a shocking event, shaking three families to their very core, and the aftermath is a complex series of actions and emotions. Lindsey, Dani, and Kendra, three women with a decades-long friendship and children who have also grown up together, struggle to not only maintain their friendship, but also their relationships with their spouses and children. Secrets are revealed, and the result is a completely addictive, compelling read.

"The Best of Friends" is a story of friends & the secrets they keep. The first chapter had me hooked and the story kept me questioning what actually happened the night of the tragedy. It was actually a little difficult for me to keep track who was who's mother and who this husband was married to in the beginning. I enjoyed the story's pacing & felt the characters were well-developed. It definitely kept me in suspense but the ending did fall flat for me. Solid 3 stars. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Three best friends, friends from school are now faced with the worst tragedy one can imagine. The death of one of their boys, and the worst part - was it an accident, was it a murder at the hands of one of the other boys or was it a suicide driven by something that not one of the parents are aware of.

Whilst one boy is in a vegetative state, the other is a gibbering mess who will not talk the three families try to make sense of this heedless tragedy at the same time trying hard to give support to each other, whilst harbouring silent, secret doubts that the other person's son is the cause of this tragedy.

The families themselves begin to unravel under the relentless pressure of the investigation by the Detectives and their own doubts not just on the other person's son but also their own and how much or how little each of them knew their own child. Instead of drawing closer together in the face of tragedy the parents themselves begin to grow distant from each other when secrets and hidden facets of their personalities begin to emerge under the pressure.

All hopes of future happiness dashed faced with losses like this families now face not just children they knew little about, but even their own partners who now seem like strangers.

Interesting take on how tragedy can blow families apart and how cracks in a relationship widen into a chasm.

DNF @ 25%

I had such high hopes for this book, but I just can't seem to stick with it. There are too many characters to try and keep track of. Also, it just seems to be taking a long time for things to get moving. Not for me, unfortunately.

This story takes you into the lives of three women, Kendra, Lindsey, and Dani, who’ve been best of friends all their lives. What happened the night their kids were shot? The story revolves around them trying to find out what happened that night. One in a coma, one dead, and one severely traumatized who isn’t talking because of that. This 🌟🌟🌟1/2 rounded to four for Goodreads is a highly recommended read. Thank you Thomas & Mercer, Netgalley, and Lucinda Berry for this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to Netgalley for my ARC of this fantastic thriller. Three best friends grow up and stay in their hometown to raise their own families. They are so happy to see that their own sons are best friends just like they were growing up. One night as the boys are having a sleepover, something terrible happens. One of them is dead, one is in a coma, and the only one left who was there that night is so traumatized that he hasn’t spoken a word since the tragic night. This fast paced thriller is centered around three families and two sets of best friends: three moms who have been friends since childhood, and their three sons. Will this event and all the secrets that begin to come to light destroy them forever? Read it to find out! There are some great twists and turns here, and the ending made me gasp. Highly recommend this one.

Fast paced read and really great story. Just the right blend and balance of drama amd strong story line that played out differently to how I pictured. Highly recommend.

Rating: 5⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐!!!!!!!!!

The Best of Friends was SO good. It is my favorite book to date of 2020. One of those books that make you neglect your work and read instead. It was such an emotional roller coaster. It had me in tears for the tragedy and despair the characters went through. I loved the reveal since it was something I just did not think of. This is thriller/suspense with a lot of drama that is a MUST READ of 2020. Have your tissues handy. Possible trigger warning.

Book: The Best of Friends (Release Date: August 18, 2020)
Author: Lucinda Berry
Genre: Mystery/Thriller/Suspense/Drama

Thank you to @NetGalley @ThomasandMercer and @LucindaBerryAuthor for an advanced copy of @TheBestofFriends

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