GONE BOY: A WALKABOUT

In 1992, the author's teenage son Galen was murdered during a random shooting spree by an extremely disturbed fellow student, Wayne Lo, at their small Massachusetts college, Simon's Rock. Following three years of depression, lawsuits, and Lee Marvin-style revenge fantasies, Gibson, an antiquarian bookseller, here tries to make sense of the tragedy. He interviews defensive college administrators who knew that Lo had ammunition in his dorm room, court psychiatrists, and disaffected friends before indicting institutional incompetence and weak gun control laws. Only when he establishes a friendship with the other gone boy's parents -- the Los, distraught by their son's crime and lifelong imprisonment -- does Gibson finally transcend his own grief in this wrenching, cathartic memoir. A-