Review: Cold Days, by Jim Butcher

Rating:

❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️

First Response:

Ok, THIS one is my favorite of the series. I mean it this time!

One Sentence Summary:

Harry's back from the dead, and takes up his position as the winter knight; but when Mab tasks him to kill Maeve, her immortal daughter, he learns that there's a lot more to the job than even he imagined.

Tell Me More:

Yo, this book is WILD.

Changes pushed Dresden emotionally. Ghost Story pushed him intellectually. This book pushes him (quite literally) all the way to the edge of the world. The stakes go up, the world gets bigger, and nothing will ever be the same.

<spoilers> from here on out.

In case you can't tell, I really liked this one. This is the book where all the major decisions that were made in Changes come home to roost and start taking effect. Harry has to take up the position of the Winter Knight, having already taken up it's magical mantle. Demonreach, the island Harry made his sanctum in Turn Coat, isn't just a well of dark magical energy, it's a four-dimensional prison built by Merlin (not the Merlin of the White Council, but the original wizard from which the position gets its title) where some of the most evil creatures in the universe are held. (For context, Skinwalkers are in the minimum security level, and we've already seen how horrible they can be.)

Look, I hate to dial it in on this one, but I've already been writing on a short story for several hours today, and I'm a little written out at the moment. This was a good book. Go read it. We get to learn why the Gatekeeper is called the gatekeeper (there are gates at the edge of the universe, and he guards them), and we finally get to put a name to the secret puppet-master who's been behind all the shadowplay in the series so far: Nemesis. Is this a reference to the Greco-Roman goddess? Yo no sé. We'll have to keep reading to find out.