This is the eighth book in the series, which is pretty impressive given, I believe, the first one wasn’t actually intended to be published, and certainly wasn’t planned as the first book of a series. But the premise lends itself to multiple stories, and the novels so far have been very good… so why not?

 

Daniel Mackmain is the son of a human man and a dryad. As a result, he can speak to, and interact with, creatures from English folklore. He is also occasionally given tasks by the Green Man. Over the course of the preceding seven books, Mackmain has given up his work as a jobbing carpenter, and settled down as estate manager at a stately home, and has a girlfriend who is a hydrology consultant and a Swan Maiden. Mackmain has also built up a network of people like himself, half-human half-folkoric creature, across the UK.

In The Green Man’s Holiday (2025, UK), Mackmain and his girlfriend, Fin, have taken a week off and rented a small cottage in the Mendips. First, the phones stop working, then their car, and then someone dumps a newborn on their backdoor step. They contact the police and the baby is returned to its distraught parents.

But it’s not a real baby, it’s a changeling. And Mackmain realises this. So he and Fin need to find the real baby, and then swap it for the changeling. They find the baby easily enough – through a portal at some nearby standing stones. But Fin becomes trapped on the other side of the portal while rescuing the baby, leaving Mackmain to resolve everything on his own. Without rousing the suspicions of the police.

But not, unfortunately, before attracting the attention of a hag (really nasty pieces of work, introduced in an earlier novel in the series). So Mackmain has to foil the hag, return the baby, and somehow find a way to get Fin back.

They’re a lot of fun these books – and yes, you do learn about British folklore. They deserve to be popular. I’ll happily read them as long as McKenna writes them. In this one, the odds seemed stacked higher than previously against Mackmain – of course, he’s sure to win through, but it feels like a close run thing. I admit a lot of the parts of England where these stories take place are unknown to me, and might as well be a foreign country. I mean, when I hear “Cotswolds” and “Mendips”, I think Midsummer Murders and what I call “chocolate box England”. The Green Man series may use similar locales, but there’s nothing sanitised (or even whitewashed) about them in the books, and they’re very much set in the UK of the twenty-first century.

Not my favourite of the series so far, but they’re all good so there’s only a tiny difference in it. Recommended.