Storm Front ~ Jim Butcher
Complete and utter fun!
My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. I’m a wizard. I work out of an office in midtown Chicago. As far as I know, I’m the only openly practicing professional wizard in the country. You can find me in the yellow pages, under ‘Wizards’. Believe it or not, I’m the only one there.
While it’s not the best written book I’ve ever read, and it does have it’s faults, it’s formulaic and slightly predictable, but as I opened this review with, it is complete and utter fun!.
Harry Dresdon is a wizard, and while not unique in that - as there are several wizards in the world - he is the best at what he does and the only one who you can find in the phone book.
Anyway, it had been a slow month. A slow pair of months, actually. My rent from February didn’t get paid until the tenth of March, and it was looking like it might be even longer until I got caught up for this month.
Down on his luck, despite a complete lack of competition, business, well, stinks. So when the Chicago P.D. come calling, Harry seizes the opportunity to take care of minor things, like paying his rent, putting food on the table, the sort of thing any self respecting wizard needs.
He soon finds himself embroiled in a grisly double murder case involving black magic, and where there’s black magic there’s trouble, and Harry’s deep in it. Certain sections of the force don’t trust him, The White Council suspect him, and to cap it all the Dark Mage behind it all, now knows his name, add in a missing husband case, a local mobster after his “services” and things are about to get interesting…
“No,” I said, shortly. “You don’t know.” And she didn’t. She didn’t know about my past, or the White Council, or the sword of Damocles hanging over my head. Most days, I could pretend I didn’t know about it, either.
All the Council needed now was an excuse, just an excuse, to find me guilty of violating one of the Seven Laws of Magic and that sword would drop. If I started putting together a recipe for a murder-spell and they found out about it, that might be all the excuse they needed.
The first in this urban fantasy series blends elements of magic, noir, and hard boiled detective series (ala Phillip Marlowe) this is never going to be high literature, to get the best out of it you need to approach this book the same way you would a summer blockbuster movie, leave your brain at the first page, get comfy, and enjoy the ride! Because magic. It can get a guy killed, you know!
I actually read this book a month or so ago and this review has been languishing in my drafts folder ever since, in the mean time I’ve also had the opportunity to pick up and read the second in the series, Fool Moon, and I can add that Butcher ups the stakes (pun, most definitely intended!) and we start to learn more of Dresden’s past and the world around him.
Rating: 
Sample Chapters from Jim Butcher’s website:
Buy: Storm Front from Amazon.
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Great review. I’ve read the first two books in the series and agree with your comparison to a summer movie. While not amazing in the literary sense, the Harry Dresden books are perfect for a quick and fun read.
Have you by chance seen any of the tv series based on these books?
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Have you had a chance to see the Sci-Fi series, The Dresden Files? It’s based off of these books and it’s really great. They made enough changes between the show and the books that it’s like getting a whole new story, yet they didn’t change any of the main elements. You’re still getting Harry and it works really well.
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