Long and Faraway Gone (Berney)

The Long and Faraway Gone 
Lou Berney, 2015
HarperCollins
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062292438


Summary
Winner-2016 Edgar Award, Best Paperback

In the summer of 1986, two tragedies rocked Oklahoma City. Six movie-theater employees were brutally killed in an armed robbery. 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 continue to echo through the lives of those devastated by the crimes. Wyatt, the one teenage employee who inexplicably survived the movie-theater massacre, is now a private investigator in Las Vegas. A case unexpectedly brings him back to a hometown and 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—specifically the day her beautiful older sister, Genevieve, disappeared at the fair. 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. Even if they find the truth, will it help them understand what happened and why they were left behind that long and faraway gone summer? Will it set them free—or ultimately destroy them? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1964-65
• Where—Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA
• Education—Loyola University, New Orleans; University of Massachuesetts, Amherst
• Awards—Edgar Award
• Currently—lives in Oklahoma City


Lou Berney is the author of several novels, including November Road (2018), The Long and Faraway Gone (2015), Whiplash River (2012), and Gutshot Straight (2010), as well as a collection of short stories, The Road to Bobby Joe (1991).

His short fiction has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and he has written feature screenplays and created television pilots for, among others, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Focus Features, ABC, and Fox. He teaches in the Red Earth MFA program at Oklahoma City University. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
The two key players [Wyatt and Julianna] in Lou Berney's superb regional mystery…suffer from separate but equally crushing cases of survivor guilt…Berney tells both their stories with supreme sensitivity, exploring "the landscape of memory" that keeps shifting beneath our feet, opening up the graves of all those ghosts we thought we'd buried
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review


[T]hat rare literary gem—a dark, quintessentially cool noir novel that is both deeply poignant, and very funny...as hip, hilarious, and entertaining as it is wrenching, beautiful, and ultimately redemptive.
Huffington Post


(Starred review.) Edgar Award–finalist Berney will raise a lump in the throats of many of his readers with this sorrowful account of two people's efforts to come to terms with devastating trauma.... The leads' struggles are portrayed with painful complexity, and Berney, fittingly, avoids easy answers.

(Starred review.) Focused, very insightfully, on love, loss, and memory . . . fully realized creations that readers won’t soon forget. A genuinely memorable novel of ideas.
Booklist


So much to love here...easy to read yet difficult to forget.... Berney is a mighty fine wordsmith whose name should be mentioned more often than it is during discussions of new bright lights in the literary world.
Bookreporter.com


(Starred review.) Twenty-five years after a devastating shooting and the unrelated disappearance of a teenage girl, the survivors of both events struggle to find out what really happened so they can move on with their separate lives.... The novel smartly avoids being coy.... But both characters do achieve their own kind of closure.... A mystery with a deep, wounded heart. Read it.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our LitLovers generic mystery questions.)

GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers

1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?

4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?

5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.

1. Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
2. Are they plausible or implausible?
3. Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?

6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?

7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?

1. Is the conclusion probable or believable?
2. Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
3. Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
4. Perhaps it's too predictable.
5. Can you envision a different or better ending?

8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?

9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?

(Generic Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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