The heartbreak of loss and the power of love intertwine in The Evening Shades, Lee Martin's suspenseful follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Bright Forever. The tightly, tersely crafted novel follows Henry Dees, a middle-aged man "with secrets and sins," as he escapes the Indiana town that haunts him. It roves among several narrators, including Dees, the town he leaves behind, the town he moves to, and Edith Green, the "spinster" who is "sick to death of being alone" when Dees arrives in Mt. Gilead, Ill.
Martin (The Mutual UFO Network; Late One Night) parses out details and teases with foreshadowing. "He knew something we didn't," says Tower Hill, Ind. "The night everything went wrong," Dees muses. The death of a beloved nine-year-old girl and her murderer's disappearance are undisputed, but why Dees, a soft-spoken math teacher, is harboring guilt when he flees to a new town is unclear. He meets Edith at Hutch's Sunoco station, and she spontaneously offers to rent him a room in her large colonial-style house, with its "hardwood floors and rose-patterned wallpaper." "We gave each other the gift of our listening," Edith recalls of their friendship. The mystery of Dees's part in the murder is disconcerting, even as he and Edith cautiously fall in love. Martin captures the nuances of small-town middle America in 1972, such as the Tower Hill residents who speculate about the murder and the diners at Mt. Gilead's Town Talk Cafe who gossip about Dees and Edith. Tension escalates, and in a satisfying conclusion, justice and love prevail. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.