DI Adams has faced down Folk, fae, and feral geese, but waking in a ditch on the Yorkshire moors, unarmed and uncaffeinated, is a new low. Worse still, her duck is missing.

And so is Dandy.

But that’s just the beginning. She’s not here by chance, and neither are the others wandering the moors. No, they’ve been put here for a reason, and if they can’t escape the estate before sunrise, they’re never going to.

Gingerbread villages, Yorkshire alligators, and haunted, statue-riddled woods would be challenge enough. But as the moon rises, the hunt rides out, and behind it something ancient stirs.

‘Dales of the Unexpected’ was the darkest DI Adams book so far. Ever since ‘ WhatHappened In London’, when Adams first encountered a threat from the Folk which most people were unable or unwilling to see, she’s been getting increasingly out of her depth. Straddling the human and Folk worlds, increasingly aware of the overlap and yet unwilling to accept or learn about the reality of the magic used by the humans, Folk, and others whom she’s determined to police, she’s been making herself into a target.  In the last book, ‘Hexed in Hawes’, her family was targeted by a Fae Lord.  In ‘Dales of the Unexpected ’, things get worse. This time, Adams wasn’t just investigating a crime; she was a victim of one. Adams off-the-books investigation of missing persons, suspiciously mis-filed in police records, leads to her being abducted and then hunted.

It was a story packed with well-crafted action scenes, but at times, it felt as though Adams was wandering aimlessly through a video game. The mystery about what was going on and the tension about what Adams could do about it (if anything) worked well for the first half of the book, but then started to wear thin. It was the descriptions of the people around Adams and her interactions with them that kept me engaged. I loved the depiction of the bluff: the ‘Nonsense, this can’t be happening’ middle-aged, middle-class white man, the likely to get wild and dangerous despite looking like a scatty hippy hedge witch, and the old guy who may be dying on his feet but still tells everyone he’s fine. I especially liked the aristocratic villains of the piece who ranged from entitled-dangerous-but-dumb, through entitled- dangerous- and-clever to so-entitled-that-no-one-else-is-real psychopath. 

The ending was dramatic but felt a little too easy and a little too optimistic, given how relatively helpless Adams had been in the face of focused malice. 

To take this series further, I think Kim Watt is going to have to reveal what it is that makes Adams so special, and Adams is going to have to stop treating magic as an aberration and start to understand it as a threat and a tool.