Review by New York Times Review
Tess's new case presents a huge challenge for this first-time parent. Years ago, a brilliant, successful and thoroughly unlikable lawyer named Melisandre Harris Dawes left her baby daughter in a parked car and watched her die. After two high-profile trials in which she was acquitted on the grounds of postpartum psychosis, Melisandre abandoned her two older daughters and fled the country. Now she's back, with a documentary filmmaker on the payroll, to reconcile with her daughters and make a movie of the event. Against her better judgment, Tess agrees to do a friend a favor and provide protection for this public pariah. But something tells her it's not going to be an easy job. Lippman knows her stuff and introduces some clever plot twists and turns (not to mention a murder). But her character studies, largely drawn from the way people feel about having children, are exceptional. Melisandre may not be anyone's idea of a model mother, but does that make her a murderer? And who's to say what makes a good parent? After all, Tess's friend and partner, Sandy Sanchez, responded to single parenthood by institutionalizing his profoundly disturbed son. ("The best thing about Mary's death was that Sandy could stop pretending to care about him.") Even Tess, besotted with love for her little hellion, has to acknowledge that having children isn't all it's cracked up to be. "No one tells you that it's, well, kind of boring," she admits. "Being a mom." At least until the next tantrum. THE TWO KEY players in Lou Berney's superb regional mystery, THE LONG AND FARAWAY GONE (Morrow/HarperCollins, paper, $14.99), suffer from separate but equally crushing cases of survivor guilt. Wyatt Rivers is a low-rent Las Vegas P.I. who does background checks on prospective casino hires. But back in the summer of 1986, when he was 15 years old and working at a movie theater in Oklahoma City, he was the only person left alive when three masked gunmen robbed the theater, killing the manager and the other five teenagers on staff. At the end of that long-ago summer, 17-year-old Genevieve Rosales, who "looked like a girl who was looking for trouble," vanished from the Oklahoma State Fair, leaving her 12-year-old sister, Julianna, traumatized for life. Julianna grew up to be a nurse, but she never left Oklahoma City, and she never stopped trying to solve the mystery of her sister's disappearance. Wyatt thought he'd suppressed the memory of his own nightmare, but when a job he can't refuse takes him back home, he finds himself struggling with the question that still gnaws at him: "Why me?" 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. "SHE PICKS AN invisible bug off her face." On that intriguing note Sandra Block begins her offbeat first novel, LITTLE BLACK LIES (Grand Central, paper, $15), a psychological suspense story smartly narrated by Dr. Zoe Goldman, a young psychiatrist doing her residency at a Buffalo hospital. Watching her mother slip into dementia has awakened Zoe's curiosity about her birth mother, who died in a house fire when Zoe was only 4. That mother fixation also draws her to a new patient, a certifiable psycho who murdered her own mother at the age of 14 and has spent more than 20 years in state mental wards. It's too bad the plot is so schematic, because the hospital scenes play well and Zoe has a quick wit that emerges in wickedly unexpected ways. HIGH, DRY and severely beautiful - that's the terrain Ben Jones sees from the cab of his 28-foot tractor-trailer rig in THE NEVER-OPEN DESERT DINER (Caravel, $25), a wondrously strange first novel by James Anderson. Ben's route is a 100-mile stretch of State Road 117 in a desolate section of Utah's high desert. His customers are isolated cattle ranchers and ornery "desert rats" who depend on him for their bales of barbed wire and cases of chili. The best part of his run is always a stop at Walt Butterfield's pristinely preserved but permanently closed vintage diner in the middle of nowhere. There's a sad story behind that, but there are a lot of sad stories on Ben's route (including his own), and Anderson tells them in a voice that's ... well, high, dry and severely beautiful. Ben's dull life takes a dangerous turn when he happens on the model home for an unbuilt housing development and discovers an attractive woman inside, playing a cello with no strings. There's a sad story behind that too, so let's just say that Anderson is one fine storyteller.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 1, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Affable Las Vegas PI Wyatt is happy doing background checks for casinos on potential management hires and getting home in time for dinner with his significant other, Laurie. When a casino exec asks him to look into who is harassing one of his in-laws, Wyatt is reluctant to take the case. When he learns he must go to Oklahoma City for it, he is emotionally rocked. Twenty-six years before, he was a 15-year-old OKC movie usher who, inexplicably, was spared execution in the murder of every other employee. That same summer, Julianna attended the state fair with her adored older sister, the beautiful and occasionally wild Genevieve, who disappeared into the crowd and was never seen again. Now a nurse, Julianna remains obsessed with Genevieve's disappearance. Wyatt's return to OKC brings everything back in a rush. Berney's first two novels (Gutshot Straight, 2011; Whiplash River, 2012) were delightful, Elmore Leonard-style crime novels. This time he's focused, very insightfully, on love, loss, and memory, and he astutely portrays the immediate and long-term psychological impact of the loss of the most important people in his characters' young lives. Wyatt, Juli, Genevieve, and Wyatt's dead coworkers are all fully realized creations that readers won't soon forget. A genuinely memorable novel of ideas.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Edgar Award-finalist Berney (Whiplash River) 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. In 1986, Wyatt Rivers worked at an Oklahoma City movie theater that was hit by gun-wielding robbers who massacred the staff, but, for some reason, let Wyatt live. A month later, 12-year-old Julianna Rosales attended the Oklahoma State Fair, where her older sister, Genevieve, walked off into the night, never to return. In 2012, those tragedies still preoccupy Wyatt and Julianna. Wyatt, now a PI, gets a case that takes him back to Oklahoma City, where he can't help reliving the night of the massacre. Meanwhile, Julianna, now a nurse, is obsessed with pursuing any possible lead to her sister's fate, and gets new hope of a breakthrough when someone posts online an image from the last evening she saw Genevieve. The leads' struggles are portrayed with painful complexity, and Berney, fittingly, avoids easy answers. Agent: Richard Parks, Richard Parks Agency. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Kirkus Book 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. Edgar nominee Berney (Whiplash River, 2012) introduces two damaged but engaging characters: Wyatt, the sole survivor of a robbery/shooting at a movie theater that left six other people dead; and Julianna, whose beautiful and mercurial older sister, Genevieve, disappeared at the Oklahoma State Fair and has been presumed murdered ever since. The plot is driven by their searches for what happened in the past as well as a present-day mystery that brings Wyatt, now a private detective, home to Oklahoma City, the site of both earlier losses. Berney alternates his focus between their two stories, and while their paths do cross once or twice, there is no forced blending of the narratives. As in classic noir, the evocation of a specific placeOklahoma Cityand time's effects add another layer of meaning. Also as suggested by the noir-ish title and tradition, Berney's novel is most truly a thoughtful exploration of memory and what it means to be a survivor. Elegiac and wistful, it is a lyrical mystery that focuses more on character development than on reaching the "big reveal." The novel smartly avoids being coy; there are answers to private detective Wyatt's case and answers to the mysteries from the past, but they reflect the truth of such moments; in the end, the answers are almost beside the point because the wondering, the questions, never really go away. But both characters do achieve their own kind of closure, and that allows the reader to also feel some comfort of fulfillment. A mystery with a deep, wounded heart. Read it. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
