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Harry Dresden, the only wizard PI in the Chicago phone book, gets a call from Sgt Karrin Murphy for help. This time it has to be off the record because Murphy has been demoted and her unit, Special Investigations, has been disbanded. There's a dead body; an apparent suicide. Janine, the victim, had been a practitioner of magic. Not all practitioners are strong enough to become wizards but Janine was an exception. She was also a Wiccan. Dresden investigates and finds a message left by magic in the room with the body. The message is a quote from Exodus: "Suffer not a witch to live." Janine is not the only victim. Murphy tells him of others. And it appears that Dresden's half brother, Thomas, a vampire of the White Court, is involved, as well as a Warden of the White Council of Wizards, to which Harry has recently been impressed. Then there is Molly Carpenter, his teenaged apprentice, with a will of her own, and another group of practitioners of magic who are in danger. Also, the White Court and the Red Court of Vampires are butting heads again. And Harry has to sort it all out. Just as Asimov's Laws of Robotics have entered collective wisdom, so has the Spielberg-Lucas mythology. At one point, Harry says: ". . . I'm increasingly unsure exactly where everyone around me falls on the Jedi-Sith axis." That's after a boat that "looked like it might have been a stunt double for the boat in JAWS" enters the picture. I started this book feeling that perhaps the series had jumped the shark, but Butcher has managed to keep that from happening. The characters are just as individual and the magic just as scary as in the previous eight books in the series Don't watch the TV series and expect it to be the same as the books. It uses Harry and Murphy but has anthropomorphized Bob the skull to a character in his own right. It has also changed the VW beetle to a Jeep and given Harry a storefront instead of a basement to live and work in. It has taken on a life of its own. Just keep the two separated in your mind and you will be fine with both. We just have to hope that the series does not become pre-eminent, as happened with Lovejoy.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, May 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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