Ben Packard was 12 when he saw his brother Nick sneak out the door of their grandparents’ lake house in the middle of a frigid Minnesota winter night. Nick never returned and Ben was the last person to see him.
In the third installment of Joshua Moehling’s Ben Packard series, A Long Time Gone, we finally get answers to the mystery that’s been plaguing him for three decades.
Packard, fresh off losing the race for sheriff and demoted from detective to court security, is at a career low when he gets put on administrative leave for use of force. Unable to face the emotional baggage he’s been building up over the years, he pours himself into the cold case of his missing brother. When that leads him to a separate suspected murder, he’s more than willing to pull threads and follow leads if it means he can keep burying his trauma. But trauma has a way of catching up with you.
Moehling balances a triple-pronged story, hopping between the Nick cold case; the investigation into Packard that raises personal and societal concerns in the wake of George Floyd being murdered in Minneapolis; and the suspected killing of Louise Larsen, the woman who lived in the lake house where he spent childhood breaks from school and where Nick disappeared from.
All these things seem to be connected, and there is definitely money and greed at play, but we only know what Packard knows and there is a whole laundry list of people who are potentially involved.
