This review originally posted at More Than Just Magic 
 So far, 2015 has been the year of the reading slump. 
 We're more than half way through February and I've barely finished anything. I've started a lot of books but nothing has really held my interest. There's a stack beside my bed of perfectly good, half-finished or even quarter-finished books. It's tragic - there's nothing worse than wanting to read a book but not actually wanting to read (fellow book-lovers I'm sure you understand this dilemma). 
 The Long and Faraway Gone broke my reading slump. When a book opens on the mass shooting of a bunch of movie theatre employees it's impossible to put said book down again. 
 The story of The Long and Faraway Gone is actually two stories running parallel to one another. The first belongs to Wyatt. Wyatt was the only survivor of the movie theatre murders in 1968. He has since moved away from his home town of Oklahoma City, and is now a private investigator in Las Vegas. But circumstances and fate intervene, and eventually he finds himself saddled with a case that requires him to return to O.C. Once there he can't help but deal with the question that has been haunting him for years - "Why was I spared?" 
 Julianna's story is a bit different but there are some significant parallels. She is also struggling with something that happened in Oklahoma City in the summer of 1968. One cool evening, her older sister had taken her to the fair and then unexpectedly vanished. She was never found, and many people believe she simply ran off, but Julianna has never stopped looking. 
 These two character arcs were one of my favourite parts of the book. Wyatt and Julianna are both survivors and as such they both suffer from some severe survivor's guilt. They're also both on a quest for answers - Why wasn't Wyatt killed too? Why was Julianna's sister taken and not her? But despite the similarities between them, they both deal with their situation in very different ways. By the end of the novel I truly felt like I had gone on a journey with these people. 
 However, I do feel as though more time was spent with Wyatt than with Julianna. This is likely because Wyatt's chapters need to deal with two major events - the mass murder he survived, and the case he's been hired to work on now. I never felt as though I was getting too much of Wyatt. He's an interesting character and his employer Candace - a woman who has recently inherited a bar - is hilarious and spunky. But I also really liked Julianna and wish we had a little more time to explore her and what her life has been like. 
 But this is a mystery, so it's not all about the characters. The Long and Faraway Gone is suspenseful, but not in the way I've come to expect from the mystery genre. I was never really worried about the novel trying to shock and surprise me in gruesome/disturbing ways. It's not that kind of mystery - the central crimes happen very quickly in the opening chapters. What makes this book so suspenseful is the waiting to see how everything that Berney has set up is going to play out. It came from knowing a piece of information was significant but not knowing which clues would end up belonging to which mystery - the movie theatre, the missing girl or the present day case Wyatt is looking in to. 
 The Long and Faraway Gone is a complex book. Lou Berney has a lot of balls up in the air throughout it, but he never dropped one. Not even once. It's a solid mystery for long time fans of the genre, but also welcoming enough for those more casual mystery readers. Or those who almost never read mysteries and just want to curl up with some really interesting characters.