In case you haven’t been keeping up, Harry Dresden – the same that has been on watch by the White Council for years – is now a Warden. It seems the war with the Red Court (a particularly powerful brand of vampires) has hit the wizard justice league pretty hard and run their numbers thin. So now Harry is charged with protecting the citizenry of Chicago and the surrounding region from supernatural threats … officially (he has been doing so the whole time anyway, now he just has jurisdiction). But wearing that grey cloak is not a simple charge and as usual there are those who would see him fail.
In Jim Butcher’s eighth volume of The Dresden Files – Proven Guilty – Harry finds himself helping out a friend in need. But what starts as simply bailing a friend’s daughter’s boyfriend out of jail evolves into a struggle with a number of fairy creatures who look like horror villains and feed on fear and ultimately into a battle in the heart of the Winter Court in the Nevernever. And all the while, Harry still is struggling with his own inner demons (or more specifically an inner fallen angel) as well as some conniving behavior by some White Court vamps who seem to leech onto the fear-feeding action. And in the end Harry finds himself facing some tough decisions that may change the rest of his life.
Once again, Butcher places Harry in some thrilling and precarious positions and as usual Harry always seems to have another card up his sleeve. Harry continues to grow and surprise all the while continuing to be himself without apology. There is little else I can say besides queue up the next book.
Blood Rites finds Harry relying on some less likely side-kicks including an incubus who turns out to have an interesting secret, a fellow wizard and former mentor, a mercenary, and a fiesty puppy. He has been avoiding one of his friends – Michael Carpenter, a Knight of the Cross – due to the fact that he had picked up a coin containing a fallen angel and worried how Michael, a hunter of fallen angels, might react. And he takes on a case where it seems a string of porn stars have been dying in bizarre accidents that may be black magic. in his downtime, he opts to take on a nest of black vampires camping out in the Chicago slums. He doesn’t come out of either debachle unscathed (nor do these two incidents add up to all the strife Harry must diffuse/survive).