As always for my Sunday reviews, I am picking a book or books that I think are very enjoyable and entertaining. The idea is that you are in the airport about to fly off somewhere and you want something to read on the plane and at the hotel for your trip.
This week I am going to review and recommend The Dresden Files series written by Jim Butcher. These books are modern urban fantasy set in present day Chicago and featuring Harry Dresden a private investigator that also happens to be a wizard. The series started about 2000, so when I say present day, I mean reasonably present day.
The books are a good mix of detective noir books with a tough PI with a heart of gold and a magical world where all the creatures and monsters from fairy tales exist. Wizards like Harry are policed and regulated quite carefully by a wizards castle and using certain spells considered to be black magic carries a death sentence. Harry escaped from an abusive mentor before the setting in the first novel (Storm Front) and he carries around a suspended sentence of death with no chances of error left to him.
The existence of the wizards in the stories are important because many of the monsters, especially the vampires, are on,y held in check because of fear and respect for the power of the wizards. The series starts with a long term but uneasy truce in place and the situation quickLu spirals out from there and some of the books are outright wars between different factions while others use the detective story framework where a new client for Harry draws him into some sort of mystery centered around a magical threat.
The stories have good and bad cops, good guy knights fighting ancient evil centered around silver coins, vampires in red and white courts, the Faerie realm, werewolves and evil wizards, and that is not even all that happens. Harry is not completely alone, he has friends and at least allies and many are recurring characters that come back in many of the books. He does have some romantic interests in the books, but he is not all that skilled in that area so most do not work out so well for him.
Harry also has issues with authority figures. He is an official consultant to the Chicago police for strange and potentially supernatural crimes, but his natural instinct is to buck the system and push back against authority figures. This includes the police, the FBI and the Wizards council. It results in him having to overcome self made obstacles all the time, but his friends tend to be few but very close. He also has issues with using nay technology as magic disrupts computers and cell phones and even causes problems with cars, especially more modern ones.
I found that the series gets better as you get more and more books into it. The first book (Storm Front) is good, certainly good enough to make you want to buy the next book, but there is a bigger payback the more you read as the writing gets better. There is no mystery as to why. Storm Front was either the first or one of the first novels that Butcher sold (he wrote others but did not sell them until later). So the writer is learning his craft as he goes. As a reader, you get the benefit of interesting characters and a good story upfront and then later you get the same and ever better writing.
As a note, the Audible.com version of the book is read by James Marsters (Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer series). He does a very good job his voice and ability to voice many different characters with their own quirks and sounds suits the stories well. Even when I am reading books, I still here his voice in my head for Harry. The main link below is for the Kindle version (so you can easily find the book and download and read it before jumping on the plane) but in the center of the page at the bottom there is a link for Audible.com. Listening to instead of reading a book can be more relaxing and easier to do if you need to drive around. Audible has a free book as part of their initial subscription and they’re owned by Amazon as well.
Storm Front is an archetypical Harry Dresden story in many ways. He s broke. He needs work and the Chicago police brings him in to investigate a death that looks linked to the supernatural. Eventually we ends up pitted against an evil wizard with pretty major stakes at risk. The book introduces us to many of the characters that we will see in the series and we also get an overview of Harry’s basic power set. He is self proclaimed to be a strong wizard, but in the earlier books he leans on preparation and set spells rather than pure magic use. In later books you’ll get to see that he actually is quite powerful, but he tends to depend on brain power rather than magical brawn to win the day and even in his more full power, he often is against being far more powerful than him.
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Storm Front (The Dresden Files, Book 1)
