July 18, 2016
British author Green’s fun second Ishmael Jones mystery (after 2015’s The Dark Side of the Road) takes Jones, a space alien who crash landed on Earth in 1963 and is now able to pass as an eternally 20-something human, and Penny Belcourt, his resourceful partner/lover at the ultraclandestine Organization, to creepy-crawly Ringstone House in Yorkshire’s forbidding North Riding. Ringstone is a black-ops debriefing center, where a veteran Organization field agent known as Frank Parker, who went rogue and now “wants to come home,” is being interrogated. Jones and Penny join the crew at Ringstone attempting to ascertain who Parker really is and what he may reveal about moles within the Organization. Grisly murder follows murder, spiked with allegedly ghostly goings-on, Jones’s constant edgy self-deprecatory banter, and the ball-breaking judo moves that Penny learned from nuns at her boarding school. Not to be taken too seriously, this meld of SF and traditional hard-boiled spy fiction hints at plenty of further adventures.