Review by Win Wiacek

After decades of togetherness, Black Canary and Green Arrow’s married life didn’t get off to the best of starts when he was abducted on their wedding night. Judd Winick and Cliff Chiang sorted out that messy business in The Wedding Album (or Til Death Do They Part, which combines that with this, not even changing the cover art).

However, some plot threads still need to be resolved and Chiang’s final series outing ‘Haystack – First Needle’ features a global hunt for felons. They’re tracked from Prague to New Jersey to London, and learn that the green team don’t act like heroes when one of their own is imperilled.

By the time London is reached Mike Norton is artist, and draws the remainder of the collection, adding a grit to the previous polish. Winick’s English dialogue is too Dick Van Dyke at times, but the action compensates. ‘Greetings from Faraway Lands’ introduces super tech thief Dodger. As the team stalk the mastermind behind the botched hit on Ollie and abduction of dying Connor, this lovable rogue slowly graduates from an initially unwilling ally into something far more for one naively impressionable archer. With dubious intel now targeting global threat Ras Al Ghul as their foe and his League of Assassins as the murder weapon, ‘Haystack part 3: the Needle’ exposes even more duplicity and misinformation as a rushed rescue mission successfully liberates a covert captive hero long gone, but somehow unmissed.

Sadly for Ollie and Dinah, it’s the wrong one, but you’ll have to wait for A League of Their Own to discover who their new sleuthing partner is.

Mystery, detection, tragedy and action, Family Business clips along at a rapid pace providing still enjoyable fights’n’tights soap opera.