YOURS, JEAN

The fifth novel from Martin, based on a real crime in small-town Illinois in 1952, begins with the on-campus murder of Jean De Belle on the first day of her first job as a high school librarian.

Jean has come to town after breaking her engagement and severing ties with hard-drinking salesman Charlie Camplain. She’s moved into an upstairs room in the home of a student and her mother, a widowed English teacher whose affection for her protégé and lodger strikes some in town as suspicious. The book’s first hundred pages, which detail Charlie’s clamorous arrival in town to win Jean back, the crime, and his capture, are a bit flat and desultory, but Martin gains his footing at the novel’s midpoint, where the book's impelling force changes from plot to psychology and where its focus turns to the crime’s beautifully mapped aftershocks. We follow the lonely, lovelorn middle-aged hotel clerk who summoned a cab for Charlie and noticed his gun; the toothless, good-natured cab driver who ended up playing a pivotal role in his capture; the high school boy pressed into service as an unwitting getaway driver on what was already the worst day of his life; that boy's estranged and anguished girlfriend, Robbie McVeigh; and the novel’s moral center and best element, Robbie's mother, Mary Ellen, the landlady, confidante, and accused lover of Miss De Belle, who stubbornly refuses to defend herself or to submit to the binary "Is she or isn't she?" thinking that the school board and fellow townspeople demand of her. In the end, Martin creates a subtle and intricate portrait of small-town mores and of the after echoes and reverberations, for those who've witnessed it, of sudden, shocking violence.

A wobbly start, but eventually Martin—like the complex woman he's conjured—finds his way.