Books by Lee Martin and Complete Book Reviews

Lee Martin, Author . Shaye Areheart $23 (269p) ISBN 978-1-4000-9791-3
The halting, harrowing narrative of Martin's second novel (after 2001's Quakertown ) draws upon multiple voices to piece together a tragedy with its own slippery backstory. On a summer evening in an "itty-bitty" Indiana town in the...
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Lee Martin, Author . Crown/Shaye Areheart $24 (288p) ISBN 978-0-307-38124-8
Pulitzer finalist Martin (The Bright Forever ) returns with a meandering, convoluted tale of an elderly gay man who gets jolted from his lonely life. Sammy Brady’s quiet existence with his basset hound, Stump, gets interrupted by neighbor...
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Lee Martin, Author No Exit $32.95 (316p) ISBN 978-1-84243-260-0
This banal London-based crime-family saga from British author Martin (Gangster Wives) follows the four foul-mouthed Doyle sisters through corny tribulations that would make the most hardened soap opera heroines blush. Frankie, the oldest, left to...
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Lee Martin, Author St. Martin's Press $13.95 (186p) ISBN 978-0-312-16433-1
Police officer Deb Ralston tackles crime in Fort Worth again, in the sequel to Martin's applauded debut, Too Sane A Murder. Wife, mother, grandmother and 16 years a cop, the detective relates events generated by her discovery of a pregnant murdered...
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Lee Martin, Author St. Martin's Press $14.95 (198p) ISBN 978-0-312-01795-8
At the urging of a friend, Fort Worth police detective Deb Ralston attends a house party given by aging Margali Bowman, a much married former film star. The friend, Fara Johnson, is Margali's daughter, and she worries that her mother is either...
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Lee Martin, Author St. Martin's Press $15.95 (212p) ISBN 978-0-312-02221-1
Fans of Deb Ralston of the Fort Worth Police Department will miss the gripping suspense that marked her appearances in Martin's ( Murder at the Blue Owl ) earlier novels. While enjoying an afternoon plane ride, the pregnant, 42-year-old Deb and her...
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Lee Martin, Author St. Martin's Press $14.95 (186p) ISBN 978-0-312-02925-8
The fifth case featuring indomitable Fort Worth police detective Deb Ralston is a winner. Martin's ( Death Warmed Over ) hallmark continues to be a fast-paced story, enhanced by snappy prose abounding with evocative details. On medical leave during...
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Lee Martin, Author St. Martin's Press $15.95 (180p) ISBN 978-0-312-03813-7
Police officer Deb Ralston of Fort Worth, Tex. ( Death Warmed Over ), near the end of her maternity leave, is present during a bank holdup and watches helplessly as the bandits collect their loot and escape with a teenaged hostage, one of the...
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Lee Martin, Author St. Martin's Press $15.95 (170p) ISBN 978-0-312-05126-6
Fort Worth police detective Deb Ralston returns to solve a string of murders in this lively procedural. The first fatality, Jane Stevenson, is assumed to have been a victim of her obesity and heart problems, but Deb shows otherwise. Examining the...
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Lee Martin, Author St. Martin's Press $20.95 (227p) ISBN 978-0-312-13028-2
The 11th Deb Ralston story (following Inherited Murder) is an exciting procedural that balances Deb's family life and her work as a Fort Worth, Tex., police detective. While Deb and her husband celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary at a huge new...
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Lee Martin, Author St. Martin's Press $22.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-312-13975-9
Family trees are gnarled and twisted, and many of the roots are hidden in the 12th outing (after Bird in a Cage) for Deb Ralston, a middle-aged Mormon police investigator in Fort Worth, Tex. Deb's son- in-law, a medical intern studying how human...
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Lee Martin. Crown, $24 (288p) ISBN 978-0-307-71675-0
An uncomfortably close friendship torn apart by jealousy lies at the center of Martin's provocative new novel. When Laney Volk, a high school dropout, goes to work at Wal-Mart, she meets beautiful, stubborn Delilah Dade and dark, sinister Rose...
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Lee Martin. Dzanc (PGW, dist.), $26.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-938103-49-0
Pulitzer-finalist Martin delivers a taut, satisfying mystery about people "bound by their stupidity and their love." In small, rural Goldengate, Ill., Della Black and three of her children die when their trailer home burns down. Four other children...
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Lee Martin. Dzanc (PGW, dist.), $26.95 (248p) ISBN 978-1-945814-49-5
Martin (The Bright Forever) cleverly exposes the fractures between husbands and wives, family and friends, in these 12 excellent stories of people lying to themselves because the truth is too painful to admit. In “The Last Civilized House,” Ancil...
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Lee Martin, Author, Amy Bloom, Foreword by Sarabande Books $21.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-9641151-2-5
""When I was a boy,"" opens the title story in this accomplished debut collection, ""my father cleaned up crime scenes. Murders, suicides."" This is the starting point for many of these narratives: a teenage 1960s protagonist whose father is in the...
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Lee Martin, Author, Amy Bloom, Foreword by Sarabande Books $13.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-9641151-3-2
""When I was a boy,"" opens the title story in this accomplished debut collection, ""my father cleaned up crime scenes. Murders, suicides."" This is the starting point for many of these narratives: a teenage 1960s protagonist whose father is in the...
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Lee Martin, Author . Dutton $23.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-525-94583-3
Set in the neighborhood of Quakertown in a north Texas city in the 1920s, Martin's first novel (after a short story collection, The Least You Need to Know, and a memoir, From Our House) perfectly captures the quiet cicada hum of everyday life in
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Lee Martin, Author University of Nebraska Press $28.95 (194p) ISBN 978-0-8032-3231-0
The last living member of his Martin family, the author attempts to reconcile the facts of his own life with the history of his ancestors in this lyrical, imaginative work. Most of Martin's relatives were farmers in the Midwest,""hard workers, but...
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Lee Martin, Author Dutton Books $22.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-525-94546-8
Relentlessly honest, Martin's account of growing up with an abusive parent is wise and healing. In 1956, when the author was a year old, his father lost both hands in a mechanical corn-picker on their Illinois farm. That tragic accident transformed...
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Lee Martin. Univ. of Nebraska, $16.95 trade paper (232p) ISBN 978-0-8032-3647-9
Martin's latest book (after From Our House) is a collection of essays exploring family, memory, the act of writing the past, and the author's childhood and adolescence in Southern Illinois. "What did I know then of the noise our living makes?"...
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Lee Martin. Dzanc, $16.95 trade paper (248p) ISBN 978-1-950539-48-2
Martin (Yours, Jean) draws on a sensationalized 1844 murder trial for this clever yarn. Leonard Reed, the glassmaker of Heathsville, Ill., dies suddenly after a brief illness. Later, Eveline Deal, the Reeds’ hired girl, claims she’d seen Leonard’s...
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