The Green Man’s Heir, by Juliet McKenna

A half-human, half-dryad gets work as – unsurprisingly – an itinerant, really quite good carpenter and general woodworker, trying to keep his head down and not draw attention to who and what he is. And then he gets drawn into a real-world police enquiry, with real-world consequences like police investigations and coroner’s reports, which is probably inconvenient enough at the best of times but doubly so when you have as much to hide as he does, and even if the police don’t realise what it is, they’re not stupid and quickly twig that he’s hiding something. The novel takes a sharp turn halfway as suddenly we learn what the real reason is and the police investigation fades into the background, but even allowing for that, I really enjoyed this one.