Singing Boy

One night, architect Malcolm Vaughn is killed in a random shooting while his wife, Sarah, and 8-year-old son, Harry, watch helplessly. As this intimate novel opens, McFarland (The Music Room) plunges the reader into Sarah's shocked, visceral perceptions of the crime, the ER, the police questioning, and her numb phone call to inform Malcolm's best friend, Deckard, a VA worker. But once this flurry of nightmarish activity ends, the deeper drama of the characters' grieving begins — a subtly wrenching, wryly unsentimental story of Sarah's paralyzing sense of loss, Harry's eerily good ''Stepford child'' behavior, and Deckard's memories of Vietnam trip-wired by his friend's death. Beautifully evoking the volatile rhythms of mourning and recovery, Singing Boystrikes a stirring emotional chord.