Lee Martin, a 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist for “The Bright Forever,” about a 9-year-old girl’s disappearance in rural 1970s Indiana, specializes in tautly written, unsettling novels that reveal the evil secrets lying just beneath the seemingly banal surfaces of American small towns. “Quakertown,” his first novel, took place in the titular African-American community in 1920s Denton, Tex.; the fictional Mount Gilead, Ill., was the setting for 2008’s “River of Heaven.”  In “Break the Skin,” a contemporary novel that suggests that Mr. Martin may be starting to settle into a formula, he returns to both Denton and Mount Gilead to tell the story of two self-deluded, lovelorn women and the troubled man who links them. Mr. Martin, who was born in southeastern Illinois and taught creative writing at the University of North Texas in Denton, seems at ease in both locations, where he tends to find characters facing similar sorts of struggles — “people who start to believe they have no choice,” as a narrator of “Break the Skin” puts it, “people so starved for love they didn’t have a thought in their heads of how easily their lives could spin out of control.” These bleak circumstances and lack of opportunities lead the characters to make dreadful decisions with tragic, often violent consequences.  At its best Mr. Martin’s work can recall Kent Haruf’s early, darker, small-town Colorado novels, like “Where You Once Belonged,” before he would go on to greater commercial success with the gentler National Book Award nominee “Plainsong” and its sequel “Eventide.” Mr. Martin, now a professor at Ohio State, is one of a growing number of accomplished authors — including Dan Chaon (“Await Your Reply”), Tom Franklin (“Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter”), and Ron Rash (“One Foot In Eden)” — who write harrowing and intellectually challenging crime novels set in small-town America.  In “Break the Skin” Mr. Martin depicts Mount Gilead as a land of trailer parks and big-box stores, a place where women watch Oprah and wear T-shirts with provocative messages in hot-pink letters: “I’m the Best You Never Had.” Mount Gilead is just one town over from the ironically named New Hope, another “ho-hum, no-chance-in-hell town,” where Laney Volk was born.  Now in her late teens, the self-effacing Laney, whose life reached its apex when she starred in a high school production of “The Music Man,” works at a Wal-Mart. She finds herself manipulating, and being manipulated by, her older co-worker roommates, the .38 Special-toting Delilah Dade and the big-hearted Rose MacAdow, who dabbles in black magic. Delilah and Rose are vying for the affections of the frontman in a local bar band.  Meanwhile, on the hot, dry plains of Denton, Betty Ruiz, a k a Miss Baby, a collector of fairy figurines and the proprietor of the Babyheart’s Tats tattoo parlor, is attempting to protect her fugitive brother Pablo from the police and from her violent ex-boyfriend Slam Dent, whom Pablo cheated in a cattle rustling scheme.  Both Laney and Miss Baby become romantically involved with Lester Stipp, an inscrutable veteran of the Iraq war, where he participated in a horrifying war crime. Stipp now suffers from post-traumatic stress and is given to dissociative fugues in which he forgets his identity, allowing himself to become, albeit briefly, whomever Laney and Miss Baby desire him to be — a lover, a confidant, or, perhaps, an accessory to murder. If Mr. Martin were writing a dark, twisted take on “The Music Man,” Lester Stipp would be his Harold Hill, not so much conning the two women in his life, but allowing them to con themselves for the sake of what they imagine might be love.  As in his previous novels Mr. Martin demonstrates a fondness for shifting perspectives and time frames, and he performs the neat trick of providing an edifying read that also succeeds as genre fiction. “Break the Skin” is not as formally ambitious as “The Bright Forever,” which rapidly cut between the stories of multiple characters in a manner that suggested a documentary film directed by Errol Morris. This novel is more of a pas de deux between Laney and Miss Baby, whose lives hurtle toward a climax that seems every bit as inevitable as it is brutal.  Does Mr. Martin, a male academic in his 50s, fully succeed at channeling the voices of two marginalized female characters? Not completely, but certainly more convincingly than Jonathan Franzen did when he wrote from the perspective of a former female athlete turned Minnesota mom in “Freedom,” or Philip Roth did in portraying an illiterate college janitor named Faunia Farley in “The Human Stain.” Which is to say that Mr. Martin is a top-notch craftsman, and once his plot kicks into gear, and his novel becomes a genuine page turner, his characterizations wind up being convincing enough.  Summarized, that plot may sound melodramatic and convoluted, and Mr. Martin’s use of tattooing as a metaphor for the permanent physical and emotional scars left by trauma can seem overwrought. “There were all these lives going on in people and they didn’t even know it, all these lives festering just beneath the skin,” Laney says near the end of the novel. “The prick of a needle here or there, and everything you thought you weren’t could get out and stain you forever.” And she’s not even the tattoo artist in this story.  But what is most remarkable about “Break The Skin” is its restrained tone and the author’s generosity toward his very needy characters. His sympathies for them rarely seem to wane, even when they are harboring criminals, conjuring hexes or plotting murder.  In this novel one of Mr. Martin’s characters even shows up on his dedication page: “For Baby, who spoke to me from her heart.” And at its own heart “Break the Skin” ultimately turns out to be “a story of love, no matter how roughed up and ugly and stained.”  Adam Langer, the author of a memoir and four novels, including âThe Thieves of Manhattan,â divides his time between New York and Bloomington, Ind.
In âBreak the Skinâ Lee Martin weaves the stories of two women to explore the evils that can lie beneath the banality of small-town life.