A Long Time Gone

• Author: Joshua Moehling
• Genre: Mystery
• Publication Date: February 4, 2025
• Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
• Series: Ben Packard #3

Thank you to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

It’s time to put the past to rest…

Ben Packard was just a boy when his older brother disappeared. Ben watched him walk out the back door of their grandparents’ house and into the cold night. 

His brother was never seen again. 

Decades later, Deputy Packard finds himself with too much time on his hands. A shooting has him on leave and under investigation, and for the first time in years, new information about his brother has surfaced that may lead them to the location of a body.

The midwinter ground is frozen solid. Worse, Packard is cut off from department resources. As he strikes out to finally uncover the truth behind his brother’s disappearance, he stumbles on a separate, suspicious death. A tenuous connection exists between the two cases, and as Packard starts to dig, he meets fierce resistance from friends and foes alike who want him to stand down.  

The winter is long and cold. By the end of it, Packard will risk everything to catch a killer and reveal the shocking truth about his brother.

This fantastic series appeared on my radar before the first book in the series released, and I have been an avid reader of each new book in the series, never getting enough of this complicated officer of the law and the background issues in small town Sandy Lake, Minnesota.

There are some series where books can be read standalone and you can jump in anywhere without finding it too hard to pick up the thread. This isn’t one of those: you need to read the books in order to fully grasp what is happening, because small town mystery elements run through each book but also as an overarching storyline throughout the series. 

Ben Packard is such an intriguing character to follow. He’s got a clear moral compass, yet has struggled with his own sexuality and internalized homophobia. As a gay man who works in law enforcement, he felt unable to come out while working in Minneapolis and dating a fellow officer, leading to complicated feelings of grief upon the man’s passing. This was his impetus for moving to Sandy Lake, a small town where he spent summers at a lake house with his family until his brother disappeared one night.

Upon his return to Sandy Lake as acting sheriff, he started tracking down the lead of what might have happened to his brother all those years ago. In this book, everything changes. At the beginning, Packard is no longer acting sheriff and has been demoted to court security officer by Shepard, a deputy who didn’t really meet the standards and capabilities to meet the demands of his new role as sheriff. 

The book starts out with Packard working his usual shift at the courthouse, when chaos breaks loose and he’s forced to shoot someone in the lobby of the courthouse. While the department investigates, Packard is placed on leave and makes it clear that so much of his identity is wrapped up in his job when he isn’t able to just relax and enjoy some time off. It doesn’t help that his mom comes to town and he spends a few days hanging out with her, only to embarrass him by making comments about his lack of dating life and suggestions for who he could ask out on a date. I also really loved that this book incorporates some really witty lines and conversational banter, some of which made me laugh out loud and startle my dogs.

As his free time drags out in front of him, he tries to find ways to fill the large open spaces in his schedule—working out, walking his three-legged Corgi named Frank, only to realize that this would be the perfect time to look at the file the department kept on the cold case of his brother’s disappearance. Nick’s disappearance was long thought to be an open and shut case, with the snowmobile by the lake, and one glove on the shore of the lake, and Nick thought to have fallen through the ice and drowned in the lake. Except, his body was never found, and new information has come to light which may direct searchers to find Nick’s body.

Packard is forced to cool his jets on that case, and finds himself doing a fair bit of introspection over the course of the book. I liked that he never lets a petty behavior slip at work, and stays professional and focused on his goals throughout. Even as he’s given an intentionally terrible, boring job, he still treats it as just as important as when he was acting sheriff. But in this story, we get to see a side of him where he continues to maintain cordiality and professionalism even when speaking to a superior who he doesn’t respect. It made me like him even more, as the kind of guy who can both talk a good game and back it up.

Over the course of following up the new leads, he steps right into another case that someone doesn’t want him investigating. I got pretty caught up in both mysteries, and while the mystery of what happened to Nick was something I wanted to know after reading about him for years, I was also quickly sucked into the current investigation that Packard stumbles into. Despite the scheme being quite complex, it was presented slowly enough for a reader like me to follow all the moving parts.

This is such a great story, and I really liked the way that readers are treated to a bit more of Packard’s emotions and how the past has impacted him in ways he is only beginning to realize. I always like seeing a character slowly peel away the layers and reveal more of who they are over the course of a series, and Packard is a character who is a genuinely good guy, so naturally I want to see him solve every case he comes across. But I’ll have to settle for knowing what happens to Nick and then come up with the most wild ideas about what is going to happen in the next book, because I really hope there’s a next one. I highly recommend those who enjoy reading police procedurals without seeing toxic masculinity from everyone with XY genes, queer people thriving in traditionally queerphobic jobs and locales, and settings that evoke a cold winter with heavy snow, and those who simply enjoy a well-written mystery.

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