Into the Thinnest of Air: An Ishmael Jones Mystery

In Green’s claustrophobic fifth Ishmael Jones mystery (after Death Shall Come), Jones, who works for the mysterious Organization, and Penny Belcourt, his lover and investigative partner, leave London for a weekend in Cornwall, where Penny has been invited by family friends to celebrate the reopening of Tyrone’s Castle, an inn with a sinister past: in 1886, the inn’s then-owner, Eliot Tyrone, poisoned all his guests on Christmas because “the Voices” told him to do so. The couple are among six guests at the festivities, which soon turn horrifying as one after another of them disappears without a trace. Green does a masterly job of making the characters’ fears palpable and maintaining suspense, until the cop-out of an ending. This entry also makes little use of the fact that Jones is an alien whose spaceship crashed in an English field in 1963 and was remade into a human being who never ages by the ship’s “transformation machines.” Series fans will hope for better next time. [em](Mar.) [/em]