The past had power. The past was a riptide. That’s why, if you had a brain in your head, you didn’t go in the water.

Ring the steeple bells! Festoon the festal bunting! Declare a bank holiday! Lars has discovered a new favorite author!

I’d never head of Lou Berney before. I think I downloaded The Long and Faraway Gone because they offered a deal for the Kindle version. But you can now list me among this guy’s faithful fans. I wish he had more published novels to date.

At first glance, The Long and Faraway Gone is simply a superior example of a subgenre that appeals to me (though frequently disappointing), what I might call the “personal cold case” story, where someone investigates a crime that touched them long ago, discovering the ways in which memory (and people, including oneself) mislead and lie.

But author Berney takes a fresh approach from the beginning – this is a two-strand story, concerning two separate murders connected only by general location and date. The two narratives run parallel through the course of the book, only brushing against each other in passing.

One strand centers on Las Vegas private detective Wyatt Rivers. He agrees to do a favor for a friend – fly to Omaha for one day to help a friend who runs a music club, who’s been plagued by acts of vandalism. Only – oh, wait – it’s not Omaha. It’s Oklahoma City. Wyatt, who has already agreed to the favor, is dismayed. Oklahoma City is the one place in the world he doesn’t want to go. Because years back, when he was a teenager and had a different name, he was one of a group of employees herded into the projection room of a small movie theater. The robbers shot them all to death – except for Wyatt. Ever since that night, he’s been living with survivor’s guilt, the memory of the girlfriend who was killed, and the obsessive question – “Why me? Why did they spare my life?”

Julianna Rosales’ life changed that same summer, at the Oklahoma State Fair, when she was only six years old. Her beautiful older sister, Genevieve, had left her alone “for just fifteen minutes” while she went to try to score some cocaine, and vanished from the face of the earth. Since then Julianna has lived without close relationships, or any purpose other than discovering the truth about Genevieve. An old photo posted on Facebook leads her to a string of new clues, and into great danger.

We follow these two wounded people as they turn over the stones of their pasts and learn that memory is fallible, and people are not always what you think they are – for better and for worse.

I enjoyed this novel immensely. The writing was flawless, the dialogue and characterization sharp and textured and layered, the plot resolutions believable. There’s great humanity, and great human compassion, in Lou Berney’s writing.

I think you could even make an argument for a kind of Christian subtext. The self-identified Christians who occasionally show up in the story can be silly, but are generally well-meaning, though the chief Christian character, for some reason, uses the “f” word a lot.

Some rough language, as you’ve already guessed from the paragraph above, and “adult” themes. But on its merits I recommend this book highly. One of the very best I’ve read recently.