Just Jennifer

The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney

“Where is she?” and “Why me?” are two questions central to Lou Berney’s latest novel, questions to which there may be no satisfactory answers.  PI Wyatt is content doing background checks of prospective employees for Las Vegas casinos and living a quiet life with his girlfriend Laurie.  One of his employees hires Wyatt to go to Oklahoma City to check in on a family member who is being harassed after inheriting a local club.  Wyatt is more than reluctant to return to Oklahoma City where twenty-five years ago he was the only survivor, inexplicably, in the massacre of movie theater employees where Wyatt worked.  Returning to Oklahoma City brings back all of Wyatt’s fears and emotions he thought he had dealt with ---or buried and without realizing it, makes him look hard at the life he is living.  The same summer, sisters Genevieve and Julianna where at the State Fair in Oklahoma City: twelve-year-old Julianna saw her older sister disappear into the crowd and has never seen her since.  Genevieve is considered to be a murder victim, but Julianna, now a nurse, cannot let go of Genevieve until she learns what happened and begins an obsessive search for her sister.  In two gripping, painfully rendered narratives, Julianna and Wyatt each search for a missing part of themselves, a search that provides no easy answers, if any at all.  Each story is distinct and separate, happening independently of each other, the two main characters crossing paths only once, but share the echo of longing of what was, what could have been and what never will be as these two damaged people struggle for a modicum of peace if not closure.  Two haunting tales, Berney’s characters are sure to linger in the minds of readers long after the last pate.