To be sure, a complex crime mystery does unfold, involving drugs and a long-ago murder and theft committed by some of John's neighbors in an upstate New York farming community.

However, he criticized the film's excessive commercialism and felt that "the script misses the pain Tim Burton caught in a man tormented by the long-ago murder of his parents."

The psychologist-detective Alex Delaware helps a friend in the Los Angeles Police Department probe the long-ago murder of a young woman.

The psychologist-detective Alex Delaware probes the long-ago murder of a young woman.

Chelsea has weathered the great flood of 1927, the hurricane of 1938, blizzards, fires and even a couple of long-ago murders, Mr. Gilman said.

Passing the house where he grew up, Arlis comes to realize that Kay was the infant who survived the long-ago murders.

The narrator is possibly a sorceress of a kind who has visions, or a simple woman describing the remnant of a long-ago murder, or is haunted by a metaphor she can't quite unwrap.

But now you've decided that my subsequent actions cancel out that long-ago murder and so I'm fit to love again.

He hovered there, far, far above the scene of that ancient carnage, that long-ago murder which had happened only months ago, as far as he was concerned.

Even Jon Ryder, a cold-case detective struck by the similarities between the fictional crime and the long-ago murder of a local girl, can respond to "the deep, pathologically spiritual loss that had pervaded the book."