I’ve been waiting for what seemed like an eternity for the price of this book to come down enough for me to buy it. I actually paid a hair over my usual limit for ebook prices, but the Dresden Files have generally been good enough to warrant an extra six cents.

This one certainly was.

If you’ve been reading The Dresden Files, you already know whether you want to read this or not. If you haven’t, this is not a good book to start with. While it wouldn’t kill you to read them out of order, I don’t advise it. That said, the weakest books in the series (in my opinion, at least) are the first two, so I could understand someone starting with Grave Peril to see if they wanted to bother. 

The last three or four books have been so dark that I started to worry the series would stop being fun, and it was a relief to read this one and enjoy it as much as I did. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a dark, dark book, but the entertainment value shines through. The plot is fast and twisty, keeping you constantly guessing what’s going on, who is on whose side, what complication will come up next. Plot threads from ten books back in the series are in play, and new ones are laid down for the future. I’m impressed by the sheer complexity of it, at every turn a new crisis is added to the pile, to the point where our hero is prioritizing them by the order they’re likely to kill him in. Also, the comedy is on, I laughed aloud often reading this one.

I’m actually a little reluctant to discuss the actual plot, because there doesn’t seem to be much point. I mean, it’s Dresden. We’re at book fourteen in this series, by now you have a pretty good idea how things go… or you don’t read the series and would like me to tell you something useful. Go read the first three, there’s my useful advice. Those of you who’ve been worried the series would get too depressing to continue with, this one will make you hungry to read more again. It’s not really much less depressing, but the crazy-awesome has been ramped up enough to compensate.

So far this was the best book I’ve read all year, and I actually changed which book I was reading next because it was a similar genre and I wasn’t judging it fairly. (The Dracove has to wait a bit longer.) I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read the other thirteen books of The Dresden Files, but I would heartily recommend the series to anyone who likes paranormal, adventure or detective stories. There are at least a half dozen books to be written and I’m looking forward to all of them.