Dead Man Walking

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.

August 1, 2016

Ishmael Jones works for a British agency so secret it is only called The Organization. Ishmael has his own big secret: he isn't human. In his latest case, the Organization sends him to Ringstone Lodge in Yorkshire to interrogate rogue agent Frank Parker, who defected and now has returned to the fold. But Parker is found dead in a highly secured cell. Only seven people are at the Manor. Which one of them killed Parker? VERDICT This sequel to the wonderful The Dark Side of the Road takes the basic structure of a traditional English country house mystery and mixes it with a bit of supernatural horror and suspense. Richard Kadrey and E.E. Knight fans will particularly relish Green's genre-blending novel.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2016
Here's the second in the Ishmael Jones series, following The Dark Side of the Road (2015). Jones, an alien living among humans, is an operative for a top-secret British government agency (the Organisation); since the early 1960s, he's been helping protect the country from all manner of monster. His new assignment is especially tough. A once-respected field agent who went rogue many years ago now wants to come back to the Organisation, but he's had facial-reconstruction surgery (to hide from his enemies), which raises an important question: Is this man really Frank Parker, or is he someone else, sent by the Organisation's opposition to infiltrate and destroy the group from within? Green, who's probably best known for the Deathstalker series of sf novels, does a fine job here of mixing science fiction, crime fiction, and horror themes. He's also created a fully realized environment and a cast of well-defined and memorable characters. We get the impression here that we're only glimpsing the surface of this new world, and before we've finished this one, we're already looking forward to the next in the series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)