The Hanging Tree

This is a busy and exciting story. It includes the Faceless Man, whom I don't like, because I don't like over-the-top villains in general. However, there's so much going on here that he doesn't dominate the story, and overall I think this is one of the better episodes in the series.

The title is a bit odd: the hanging tree is mentioned in the course of the story, but it seems a minor historical detail that isn't particularly relevant to the plot. I guess that the author struggled in vain to find any suitable title for this one, which is about complications arising from the accidental death of a teenage girl.

The complications turn out to involve the Faceless Man, but also various other players operating independently and sometimes conflicting with each other. There's a spectacular finale in which they all get involved in a kind of mass shootout—inside the expensive block of flats at One Hyde Park in London, which is a real building that you can see in Google Maps Street View, and indeed elsewhere on the Web.

This story is our first encounter with Lady Helena Louise Linden-Limmer and her adopted daughter Caroline—although we met Caroline briefly earlier under an assumed name. We also meet Michael Cheung for the first time. Abigail Kamara doesn't appear in the story, unusually.