Bry's Bountiful Book Blog

I really liked this book, despite being forewarned by numerous people that it's one of the lesser Dresden Files books. Sure, it was pretty predictable, but I've never encountered a detective story that didn't rely heavily on the tropes of the genre, and I include the fantastic Sherlock Holmes and C. Auguste Dupin stories (which created the genre) in my statement. I don't necessarily need every book to be blindingly original to enjoy it, which is a good thing considering the fact that almost everything has already been done by someone at some point. Although I do enjoy a cerebral read, I also don't feel like every book I enjoy has to be particularly deep, and this one isn't. It's entertaining, not insightful(these two attributes are not mutually exclusive, but many books tend to favour one over the other, I find).

The prose was fast-paced and uncomplicated, making for a quick read but pleasantly lacking the tendancy to overuse terrible simile shown by some of the more pulp offerings of the detective genre("her words hit me like a slug from a .45," that sort of thing). The dialogue was decent, if a little cleaned-up seeming. The characters were on the stereotypical side, but with Harry's soul-gazing power they tend to gain a bit more dimension than is usually seen in genre fiction. The thing I really liked the most was actually the magic system. It merges elements of traditional ritual magic(circles of protection, quasi-latin verbal components, the power of names, ect.) with various mythological elements(the Fae, vampires, demons) to create a familiar, and yet still interesting magic system, which I'm sure is expanded upon in the successive novels in this series.

Which novels I will now begin to hunt down and read.