TITLE: The Long and Faraway Gone
AUTHOR: Lou Berney
GENRE: Fiction
PUBLISHED: February 10, 2015
RATING: ★★★★ 1/2
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Description: With the compelling narrative tension and psychological complexity of the works of Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, Kate Atkinson, and Michael Connelly, Edgar Award-nominee Lou Berney’s The Long and Faraway Gone is a smart, fiercely compassionate crime story that explores the mysteries of memory and the impact of violence on survivors—and the lengths they will go to find the painful truth of the events that scarred their lives.
In the summer of 1986, two tragedies rocked Oklahoma City. Six movie-theater employees were killed in an armed robbery, while one inexplicably survived. Then, a teenage girl vanished from the annual State Fair. Neither crime was ever solved.
Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those unsolved cases quietly echo through survivors’ lives. A private investigator in Vegas, Wyatt’s latest inquiry takes him back to a past he’s tried to escape—and drags him deeper into the harrowing mystery of the movie house robbery that left six of his friends dead.
Like Wyatt, Julianna struggles with the past—with the day her beautiful older sister Genevieve disappeared. When Julianna discovers that one of the original suspects has resurfaced, she’ll stop at nothing to find answers.
As Wyatt's case becomes more complicated and dangerous, and Julianna seeks answers from a ghost, their obsessive quests not only stir memories of youth and first love, but also begin to illuminate dark secrets of the past. But will their shared passion and obsession heal them, or push them closer to the edge? Even if they find the truth, will it help them understand what happened, that long and faraway gone summer? Will it set them free—or ultimately destroy them?
Review: The Long and Faraway Gone turns out to be quite a gem, although I admit I began the book with low expectations. The novel seems like the typical lowbrow type of thriller/true crime novel, one you might pick up at a drugstore book stand. It seemed at first that I'd read many books just like it - but I was pleasantly surprised, especially by the quality of the writing - this novel is much better than I thought it would be. My initial decision to read this novel is its cover art and font. The cover reminds me of the cover art for We Are Called to Rise and The Given World. The three novels are really not related in any way, except, like We Are Called to Rise, The Long and Faraway Gone are each told with alternating narrators, a technique that often is hard to get right, but these two novels the narrative flows naturally and seamlessly between their multiple narrators.
Right away, The Long and Faraway Gone starts strong with a shocking scene - a robbery in a movie theatre. The initial narrator never reappears, although if you pay attention his young daughter makes a cameo appearance. We later learn that all except one character are killed.
The robber with the shotgun stripped the pantyhose off his head. “On the floor,” he told Bingham. “Head down. Hands behind your back.”
Bingham squeezed in at the end of the row, between Karlene and the projector for auditorium number two. He laid his cheek against the floor. The polished cement was unbelievably filthy, twenty years of machine grease and shoe scuffs and smeared ash from the two packs of Camels that Harry smoked every shift.
Karlene faced him, close enough to touch. Her eyes were glazed, her chin slimy with tears and snot. She wasn’t the one Bingham could hear sobbing, though.
“It’s going to be fine, Karlene,” Bingham whispered as one of the robbers tied his hands tight behind his back. “You’re going to love Hawaii.”
“Bang!” the robber in the Freddy Krueger mask said, right behind Bingham.
Bingham closed his eyes and ignored the sticky liquid heat that spread beneath him. It wasn’t as if the floor could get any filthier, could it?
He tried to picture his daughter’s face. Tiffany was six, the result of a drunken, ten-minute fumble on one of his rare nights off. Her mother was one of the tough-looking girls who worked the door at the Land Run, checking IDs and occasionally introducing the bands. When Bingham found out she was pregnant, he’d offered to marry her. She’d just stared at him with an expression that said, Are you out of your mind?
Bingham hardly ever got to see his daughter. Tiffany’s mother blew off his already meager visitation rights whenever she felt like it. If ever Bingham scraped together some money, he planned to hire a lawyer so he could see his daughter more often, so she wouldn’t grow up wondering who was this stranger in a cheap suit who brought her a Cabbage Patch Kid every now and then, who always smelled like burned popcorn.
“No,” Bingham heard O’Malley say down by the other projector. “No, wait a second, just listen.”
“Shut up,” the robber with the shotgun said. Bingham heard a thump.
The author starts the next chapter with alternating narrators: Wyatt & Julianna. Wyatt, we learn, is a private detective, now living in Las Vegas. As a teenager, Wyatt was the sole survivor of the aforementioned robbery. He has since changed his name and had left Oklahoma City long ago, lured back only to solve a case. Julianna is a hospital nurse, still in Oklahoma City, who also tells her personal tragedy via flashbacks. Around the same time period as the robbery, Julianna's sister Genevieve, abandoned her at the fair, telling her she'd be right back to get her, and disappeared forever. Although the police eventually gave up on finding the killer, Julianna has never stopped looking for clues regarding her sister's disappearance. Apparently, this novel was inspired by two real life cases in Oklahoma City from the author's childhood. It shows; the scenes in the novel have a ring of truth to them, and feel as real and terrifying as real life events. Probably also because of the author's strong connection to the events, this is a novel with a strong sense of place. Although I've never been there, the author did a good job of describing Oklahoma City, and I've read many reviews by people in the area who recognize many of the places and events described.
In the hands of a different author, Wyatt and Julianna would have met and had an affair, but not in this novel. I was expecting it, but it never came; in fact, the two characters barely crossed paths, and it was over halfway through the novel. And when they did meet, it only served to advance the plot in a logical manner. Only one event rang false: Julianna's persistence in tracking Genevieve's killer. Julianna is able to track down the main suspect in the case, a drifter, a felon, a carnie, who invited Genevieve to his trailer just minutes before her disappearance. He had an alibi, yet over the years Julianna never lost the feeling that he had something to do with Genevieve's disappearance. But her dangerous obsession with confronting him is unbelievable, and the situations she put herself in with him seemed too implausible, even over-the-top,. She harassed the man constantly until he agreed to come over for a home cooked meal!
That was all she could be certain was true, Julianna reminded herself, out of everything Crowley had told her.
“Why didn’t you tell the police any of this?”
“Why do you think? They was looking for any reason to get further up my ass. And I didn’t have nothing to do with nothing.” He patted the sofa cushion next to him. “Come on over here a minute, why don’t you?”
Julianna stayed where she was, in the chair, two steps from the carving knife she’d left on the kitchen counter. Even if his bad back was a fiction, she thought she’d be able to get to the knife before Crowley got to her.
He held out his hand. “That pinkie finger there? See how it’s crooked? That’s from a cop picked me up one time for disorderly conduct.
Murray, Kentucky. Broke my finger in two just for the fun of it.”
“Are you sure that’s all you remember?” Julianna said. “Do you remember anything else at all?”
Crowley pulled his boot off the coffee table. He got to his feet slowly, heavily.
“Where are you going?” Julianna said. She stood, too.
“Dinner’s over, ain’t it?” he said, his blue eyes innocent. “Unless you got something else in mind, of course.”
“Just . . . wait,” she said.
“I’m sorry, darlin’,” he said. “I gave you everything I got.”
He moved to the door. Julianna followed. She felt a panic rising in her. She had to fight to stay above it.
“Anything else,” she said. “The smallest detail. Anything at all.”
He opened the door but then stopped. “I do recall now she said one thing. Your sister did. Was the last thing she said to me, right before she took off.”
“What did she say?” Julianna said.
“Didn’t mean nothing to me at the time. Now I think about it, though, after what happened and all . . . well. Might be it means something after all.”
Julianna reached for Crowley’s arm. She gripped it tight.
“What did she say?” she demanded, and then in the next breath—when he turned back to her, when he smiled—she realized just how perfectly he’d played her.
He stepped even closer and put a finger beneath her chin. Julianna let him. He tilted her head back, gently, so that he was looking right down at her.
“Bet you’d like to know,” he said. “Wouldn’t you?”
Creepy! And believe it or not, the plot gets even crazier- at least Julianna's interactions with this guy.
The book offers multiple layers of mysteries. One, who robbed the movie theatre, and as a lesser puzzle - why was Wyatt the only one spared, leaving him grateful but with survivor's guilt that haunted him his whole life? Then there is Wyatt's own case that brought him back to Oklahoma City - he was hired to investigate who was vandalizing a local bar. That case wasn't a real mystery, nor were the events that unfolded particularly compelling. Then there was the force that has shaped Julianna's life - the mystery of what what really happened to Genevieve - and the answer is very unexpected. This issue is resolved neatly by the end - but then there is a bonus chapter. The last chapter is narrated by Genevieve in 1986. Can't say more without spoilers.
I highly recommend this novel for all readers.
