Waiting on Wednesday (46)

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating. So here's a thing I've been looking forward to for a long time: Skin Game, by Jim Butcher (27 May 2014).

Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard, is about to have a very bad day. As Winter Knight to the Queen of Air and Darkness, Harry never knows what the scheming Mab might want him to do. Usually, it’s something awful.

He doesn’t know the half of it…

Mab has just traded Harry’s skills to pay off one of her debts. And now he must help a group of supernatural villains—led by one of Harry’s most dreaded and despised enemies, Nicodemus Archleone—to break into the highest-security vault in town, so that they can then access the highest-security vault in the Nevernever. Worse, Dresden suspects that there is another game afoot that no one is talking about. And he's dead certain that Nicodemus has no intention of allowing any of his crew to survive the experience. Especially Harry.

*****

This is Book 15 in a projected 20 or so, to be followed up by what the author promises will be an "apocalyptic trilogy" (because everybody like apocalyptic trilogies, amirite?) to cap off the series. So we're well into the part of the series where things have already gotten pretty bad but are still getting worse, and not yet to the part where we might begin to see some glimmers of a resolution. 

Still, it's always fun (for the reader, anyway) to watch Harry Dresden have a bad day.

Waiting on Wednesday (30)

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.  So here's a thing I'm looking forward to: Dangerous Women, an anthology edited by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin (Tor Books, December 3, 2013).

Writes Gardner Dozois in his Introduction, "Here you'll find no hapless victims who stand by whimpering in dread while the male hero fights the monster or clashes swords with the villain, and if you want to tie these women to the railroad tracks, you'll find you have a real fight on your hands.  Instead, you will find sword-wielding women warriors, intrepid women fighter pilots and far-ranging spacewomen, deadly female serial killers, formidable female superheroes, sly and seductive femmes fatale, female wizards, hard-living Bad Girls, female bandits and rebels, embattled survivors in Post-Apocalyptic futures, female Private Investigators, stern female hanging judges, haughty queens who rule nations and whose jealousies and ambitions send thousands to grisly deaths, daring dragonriders, and many more."

*****

Can't go wrong with that. I probably would have picked this up just from the description, but I happen to know that this contains a Dresden Files story by Jim Butcher (telling what happened to Molly in her Ragged Lady phase) and a Westeros story by George R. R. Martin (the history of the Dance of the Dragons, a civil war in the distant backstory of his Song of Ice and Fire series), so I'll definitely be getting hold of this as soon as I can.

Ghost Story

Who shot Harry Dresden?

When we last saw our hero, the only professional wizard in the Chicago phone book, he had just been shot and left for dead in the cold water of Lake Michigan. Six months later, supernatural Chicago is in bad shape, with the good guys struggling to make up for Harry’s absence and maintain a certain amount of peace in spite of the mad scramble to fill the power void left by the eradication of the Red Court of vampires. Harry finds himself on the wrong side of both life and afterlife, asked to return as a shade to solve his own murder and told that three people he loves will surely suffer if he does not. But a shade is only memory: invisible and inaudible to most people, unable to affect the physical world, and (Harry learns to his horror) unable to work magic. How can he do anything to help his friends if he can’t actually do anything?

What I really liked about the answer to that question was that Harry had to use a method he has frequently been able to get away with ignoring: he has to think. He is, after all, a detective, even if his favorite way of getting answers has always been to blow stuff up until someone starts talking. And because a shade is only the sum of its memories, we get to see Harry remember events that have previously only been alluded to. I read this book in one fell swoop the afternoon it came in the mail, and really enjoyed this glimpse of a more reflective Harry Dresden. I have some concerns about the implications of the ending, but I’m quite interested to see where Jim Butcher takes the series next.

Changes

I suppose it can't really count as a spoiler if it's mentioned in a book's first line, never mind that it was revealed on the author's website and (I'm told) his Twitter feed prior to publication, plus it's in the jacket copy, but I still feel like I ought to warn people to brace themselves for this one:  Harry Dresden has a daughter.

It comes as a shock to him too.  The girl's mother, Susan Rodriguez, exited the series seven books ago after an attack by Red Court vampires began the process of turning her into one of them; she joined the Fellowship of St. Giles to fight both the Red Court and her own half-vampire nature.  Now it turns out she hid her child from everyone, including Harry, to protect her, but word of her got back to exactly the wrong vampire, and little Maggie has been kidnapped by Red Court Duchess Arianna Ortega.  Harry knows he'll need more power than he and his personal friends can raise to rescue his child, and when every supposedly good entity he goes to for help turns him down, for what seem to them to be insurmountable reasons, more questionable sources of power come inevitably to mind.

Twelve books into the series, it's getting difficult to summarize a new entry without recapping a hell of a lot of backstory.  I'm not really complaining about that; one of the things I really like about the series as a whole is the way that seemingly minor characters or plot points in early books later turn out to have much more significance than they appeared to at first.  This volume even has a callback to the barely competent sorcerer Harry defeated in the very first book, Storm Front, and includes nearly all of the supporting cast Harry has built up over the whole series, though a number of them (Marcone, Kincaid, and the archangel Uriel among these) only make cameo appearances.

This one is also the first to end on such an appalling cliffhanger.  And I have to wait another year to find out what that last page meant?  I'm also really looking forward to exploring the ramifications of some of the hard choices Harry had to make this time, and I'm just glad Jim Butcher has no record of missing his deadlines. 

Turn Coat

Private investigator and professional wizard Harry Dresden has spent half of his adult life looking over his shoulder for Donald Morgan, Warden of the White Council; Morgan's been watching for any infraction of the Laws of Magic, so that he could execute Harry on the spot with the Council's blessing.  And now Morgan has collapsed at Harry's door in a bloody heap, after asking to be hidden--from the Wardens.

Super!

I read the first couple of Dresden Files when they were new, and really liked the character and the concept, but the third one lost me halfway through.  I didn't like where I thought I saw it going, and I just wasn't in the mood for vampires, and I put it down unfinished.  Always meant to go back to it, somehow never did, though I was vaguely aware of the series as the years went by.  Oh look, there's a new one out, I should go back and read those.  Oh look, they've made the jump from paperback originals to hardcover, good for him, I should read those.  Oh look, there's a graphic novel--

It was the graphic novel Welcome to the Jungle that really made me sit up and think, I need to read those now.  I got hold of it in February, and by the first week of March I'd read all ten of the extant novels, then had to wait a month for this one, the eleventh, to come out.  Waiting a year for book 12 is going to be difficult.

The great thing about reading the whole series in a breathless rush like I just did is that that made it easier to track the character development and the interweaving plot lines.  Harry has clearly matured over the ten or twelve years of internal chronology, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing what changes are in store for him before we get to the big apocalyptic trilogy that Jim Butcher promises to cap off the series.

Originally posted at MySpace 4/18/09