Thin Air is something of a sidestep for Constantine, probably best known for her vampire and angel characters. Dex is the ‘rock star’ given to strange violent outbursts; who feels himself trapped in a media persona; that his fans don’t appreciate the seriousness of his music. Feel like you’ve heard this one before? At least Warner managed to restrain themselves from referring directly to the Manics’ lost Richie on the cover but the selling point is blatant enough.

We enter the book when he vanishes, leaving his music journo girlfriend, Jay, to pine and pick up the pieces. Slowly the story behind Dex’s disappearance is revealed: his record label have a habit of giving parties for a ‘select group of friends’. The usual drugs and sexual slippages go on. We are informed that Dex feels every ‘forbidden desire could be gratified’ but these are never shown, so Dex’s motives for his actions are always confusing.

The record label, Sakrilege, are part of the Three Swords cabal, more shadowy figures looking for power. They fear the release of Dex’s final album, the one where he tells everything that went on at the gatherings, as if even a ‘murder’ would do anything other than sell a stack more CDs.

The relationship between Dex and Jay is thinly drawn. The five years they’re together before Dex vanishes are unconvincingly shown. Neither Dex or Jay are likeable, they’re too stereotypical, and too irritating. I had the feeling that Constantine didn’t like them much either. It is the characters on the periphery, particularly Julie, Dex’s sister from ‘up north’ who come across as more ‘real’. The chapters that give the family background to Dex are Constantine at her best: the tough spirit of people in ‘hopeless’ lives comes across well without being patronising. These are far stronger spirits than Jay, who falls apart at the loss of her job or her boyfriend. Of course she would, you say, and if the relationship between Dex and Jay had convinced me of any depth I would feel for Jay too.

The vanishing itself is well done. That there is a ‘place between places’ where people withdraw and sink into nostalgia has a kind of allegorical truth about it, but Lestonholme is never fully explored, and, on the whole, this didn’t feel like a Constantine book.