Book Review: Dresden – Ghost Story and Cold Days

Book Cover for Ghost Story

Book Cover from Amazon

BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON
Ghost Story by Jim Butcher
When we last left the mighty wizard detective Harry Dresden, he wasn’t doing well. In fact, he had been murdered by an unknown assassin.

But being dead doesn’t stop him when his friends are in danger. Except now he has nobody, and no magic to help him. And there are also several dark spirits roaming the Chicago shadows who owe Harry some payback of their own.

To save his friends-and his own soul-Harry will have to pull off the ultimate trick without any magic…

Book Cover for Cold DaysBook Cover from Amazon

BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON
Cold Days by Jim Butcher
After being murdered by a mystery assailant, navigating his way through the realm between life and death, and being brought back to the mortal world, Harry realizes that maybe death wasn’t all that bad. Because he is no longer Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard.

He is now Harry Dresden, Winter Knight to Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness. After Harry had no choice but to swear his fealty, Mab wasn’t about to let something as petty as death steal away the prize she had sought for so long. And now, her word is his command, no matter what she wants him to do, no matter where she wants him to go, and no matter who she wants him to kill.

Guess which Mab wants first?

Of course, it won’t be an ordinary, everyday assassination. Mab wants her newest minion to pull off the impossible: kill an immortal. No problem there, right? And to make matters worse, there exists a growing threat to an unfathomable source of magic that could land Harry in the sort of trouble that will make death look like a holiday.

Beset by enemies new and old, Harry must gather his friends and allies, prevent the annihilation of countless innocents, and find a way out of his eternal subservience before his newfound powers claim the only thing he has left to call his own…His soul.

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A Quick Aside
So I decide to publish book reviews about a couple recent Harry Dresden books and while looking up the links I discover a Kickstarter campaign for a Dresden Cooperative Card Game. If this is something you might be interested in, please pop on over to the Kickstarter site and see what it is all about. A happy coincidence which I hope brings some great fun to people.

KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN FOR A DRESDEN CARD GAME – HAPPENING UNTIL MAY 19, 2016 AT 5:00 EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/evilhat/the-dresden-files-cooperative-card-game

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MY REVIEW  Ghost Story (Book #13)

Life got busy and I stopped reading Harry Dresden for a while, partially because the stories felt repetitive.

AND THEN HE DIED. OMG!

“Ghost Story” was amazing to come back to after my hiatus from the series, and I may need to go back and reread some of my Dresden and pick up the novels I have missed. All my favorite characters, but changed because the connecting tissue of Dresden was expunged with his death.

But … wizards are bad at staying dead – Dresden never knew when to shut up and stop interfering and a little thing like no longer breathing is not going to keep a lifetime of habits, including saving the world, from continuing.

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MY REVIEW  Cold Days (Book #14)

Happy Birthday Dresden, welcome back from the Dead, by the way you need to save the world today.

Another Harry Dresden knock-down, drag-out roller coaster ride. Cold Days start in the Winter court and you *might* think you can figure out the good guys form the bad, but attributing good and bad to fairies is never advisable and by the end of the book the reveals totally change the perspective on what, why, and whom does stuff in the fairy portion of the Dresden universe.

This book is a game-changer in the Harry Dresden world, and I am interested to see how the new knowledge about why fairies do the things they do will affect Dresden in his role as Winter Knight – but also in his role as a human being. Because even though good and bad don’t matter to soulless fairies, Dresden has meet angels and demons and his very-human soul is on-the-line while he saves the world in future books.