She could well have seen who had killed the girl. If so, what good was that? A dryad was one witness the police could never take a statement from. [loc. 234]
Daniel Mackmain is a woodworker and carpenter, whose mother is a dryad. Dan doesn't care to put down roots, to settle anywhere or with anyone: all too soon they'd notice that he was different. Still, he longs to find someone who truly understands his life.
Dan's living in rural Derbyshire, led there by dreams, and thinks he might have found some woodlands ancient enough to harbour dryads like his mother. He's right: but that's not all they harbour. A local girl is murdered, with a dryad as the only witness, and there are other bones lying undiscovered in the wood. Something is stalking the woods, something worse than the boggarts that torment the pub dog; something far worse than Dan's irritatingly nosy landlady or his fed-up girlfriend. Dan finds help from unexpected sources, but he's also human enough, and visible enough -- and behaving suspiciously enough -- to be a person of interest to the local police, and to the thing that walks by night.
I wanted to like this more. However, I didn't find Dan likeable or relateable -- he has an explosive temper and is really unpleasant to the nosy landlady, and to others -- and I felt his first-person narrative was rather flat: he describes making a sandwich, or going to the supermarket, in much the same tone as a fight against supernatural evil or an encounter with an apparently-benevolent nature spirit. I also experienced narrative dissonance, in that I found myself very sympathetic to one of the nasties, because the language Dan used to describe it was so very un-nasty. Poor frantic little wyrmling, crying for its parent!
The Green Man's Heir is very much a book of two halves: in each half, Dan locates and battles a supernatural villain, with the help of a not-quite-human female, but there is very little crossover between the two stories. I'm not convinced, either, that the title really works with the book as it stands, though I concede that a sequel may clarify that matter.
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