Review: Proven Guilty, by Jim Butcher

Thank God we’re escaped the uncanny valley.

Rating:

🍿🍿🍿🍿.75

First Response:

The tone of this one was different. I’m not sure I liked it.

One Sentence Summary:

Harry’s given the heads-up that black magic is coming to Chicago— and when monsters start popping up at the local horror movie convention, he jumps on the case.

Tell Me More:

There’s been a shift in the Dresden-verse.

Usually The Dresden Files are fun, even silly mystery/ adventure novels. Harry Dresden is a wisecracking wizard-turned-detective who uses his powers to protect the citizens of Chicago from the paranormal denizens of the Nevernever who mean them harm. He fights demons in the nude and battles vampires in rubber duckie boxers! He takes down necromancers with reanimated tyrannosaurs!

And in this book, he tries his damnedest not to kill a kid.

From its opening pages, which detail the execution of a young warlock, this book is taking itself seriously. Harry isn’t just a down-and-out wizard anymore— he’s a grey-cloaked warden of the White Council, and the White Council is at war. Harry is a soldier. A reluctant soldier, but a soldier nonetheless.

When I finished Dead Beat, I wondered how long the war with the Red Court was going to last. It started in the third book, and has been running in the background ever since. I felt like the distance between Harry and the war removed any urgency I felt for the battles happening off-screen. I often heard about attacks and counterattacks, but never actually saw them on the page. This book fixes that issue (albeit indirectly).

The back half of this book is all about tactics and politics. Maneuvers and counter-maneuvers. Harry even takes part in a battle between the vampires and the Council (unwittingly and from a distance, but he gets a medal for his heroism in battle).

At the very end of the novel, Harry tells one of his friends that he thinks there’s a greater force at work behind all the supernatural interlopers that have invaded his city over the past few years. I’m interested to see if the series shifts from it’s episodic structure to a more epic space over the next few books. I’m only on book 8 of a slated 24-25, so with two-thirds of the series left to go, I kinda hope so (but I also kinda don’t…).

I decided to take off a quarter of a star for this one because… well, this book just wasn’t as funny as the others. It was a fun read, but it wasn’t as funny. I can’t entirely blame it though— Dead Beat’s finale is hard to follow. I’m excited to see where the next book goes