DI Adams is not having a good summer. Her house has been hexed. Her DCI’s muttering about mental health breaks. Her invisible dog keeps disappearing at inopportune moments. And to top it all off, her parents have just turned up, determined to experience all Yorkshire has to offer.
And they’re going to get more than they bargained for, because someone else has turned up too. 
He calls himself Velmyr Duskthorn, Lord of the Fae, and he’s demanding a powerful book Adams doesn’t have, can’t get, and couldn’t hand over anyway – unless she fancies starting an inter-species war.
But when her parents go missing, the whole game changes. 
Now Adams is racing against rogue portals, dangerous sheep, and trigger-happy farmers, plus the closing net of her own colleagues. Her allies are thinning out fast, but she still has her duck, her Dandy, and one very large stick. And this is her family.
So if Faery wants to fight? Come on and give it a go …

IN A NUTSHELL
‘Hexed In Hawes’ is the best DI Adams book in the series so far. It has more tension than the earlier books. It gave me a deeper insight into DI Adams, introduced a fairly scary Fae, moved the story arc forward and still delivered the cheerful chaos that I enjoy so much.

The DI Adams books have always been a little harder-edged than the Beaufort Scales of Gobbelino London books that I’ve read. Most of that is down to Adams herself. She’s only reluctantly involved in the world of the Folk. She mostly resents the demands it makes on her, especially, perhaps, because no one ever tells her in advance what those demands are. Adams defaults to an adversarial I’d-arrest-you-if-I-could approach to magic users and Folk, partly because they want to use magic to do bad things, and partly because arresting people is what makes her feel that the world has an order that she can control.

In ‘Hexed In Hawes‘ DI Adams gets to give her adversarial instincts full rein. She’s been targeted by a Fae Lord. Worse than that, the Fae Lord has threatened her parents. This ramps up the tension in the book. For the first time, I felt that DI Adams was at risk. 

The Fae that Adams is facing off with is scary: ruthless, arrogant and powerful. I loved that, even while making me believe in the Fae Lord as a threat, Kim Watt managed to ridicule his sense of entitlement and narcissism in a way that made Adams’ contempt for him clear. In the end, I think it was clear that Adams is scarier than a Fae Lord. I think she’s the only one who can’t see that.

Underneath the tension, there was, of course, a gentle current of humour. It’s a book filled with cheerful chaos, where moments of tension often just burst into unplanned, noisy, disruptive action that somehow feels like a benediction. 

For me, one of the best things about ‘Hexed In Hawes‘ was that I got to meet Adams’ parents, who have come to Yorkshire to spend a week’s holiday with her. They were a delight. The banter between them made me smile. They explained a lot about Adams. I was glad to see that Adams wasn’t from a long line of magic users that her mother had kept secret. She is the product of a loving family and her own doggedly structured way of looking at the world.