The Long And Faraway-Gone Lou Berney

The Long And Faraway Gone

Lou Berney

Morrow, Feb 10 2015, $14.99

ISBN: 9780062292438

In August 1986 at the Pheasant Run Twin Theater in Oklahoma City, a man with a stocking over his face and carrying a shotgun demands manager Bingham tell him how many employees are there and to open the safe.  Bingham asks the robber to leave his staff alone, but the man and his cronies round them all up and place them face down on the floor.  The killers execute the employees, but for some unknown reason let one of them Wyatt Rivers live.

In September 1986 sisters Julianna and Genevieve Rosales enjoy the Oklahoma State Fair.  Leaving behind at the fair her twelve year old younger sibling; Genevieve walks away never to be seen again.  Though the case is unsolved OCPD assumes she was murdered.

In 2012, a case returns private investigator Wyatt to the city he never wanted to come back to; as he remains haunted with a need to know why him since the mass murders over twenty-five years ago.  Nurse Julianna also remains fixated on 1986 with an obsession to learn what happened to Genevieve.  After a quarter of century of no progress, Julianna finally finds hope for closure from an online posting of that fatal night at the fair.

This great drama grips the reader with a need to know almost as strong as the traumatized protagonists.  Rotating perspective between the PI and the nurse in the present, The Long And Faraway Gone looks at the long term impact of trauma on people suffering from PTSD, survivor guilt and an over two decade unfulfilled need to know why bad things happened to innocent people like they were before the respective tragedies, but not to them.

Harriet Klausner