Grave Peril - Jim Butcher

There’s been a recent outbreak of angry ghost activity in Chicago, and Harry Dresden is naturally the guy who has to stop it. He does have some assistance from a man named Michael, who carries the title “Fist of God”, and a blessed sword to go with it, but Harry would have to figure out who needs a meeting with the business end of the sword first. That’s going to require traveling into a realm called the Nevernever, which is home to all manner of supernatural beings, included a faerie queen, Harry’s Godmother, who says he made a deal with her long ago he needs to keep. Except Harry keeps ducking it, with dire consequences for a lot of people.

It’s good to see Harry have to deal with the results of breaking his word. He seems to do it often, always with some reason or another, but it seems like a bad habitat for a wizard. He says in this story that most words, in of themselves, don’t have power. They’re just a way for wizards to focus and direct the magic.  Even if that’s so, it would seem unwise for a wizard to repeatedly demonstrate that what he says means nothing, in terms of getting the desired effect when he tries to direct a spell.

I’m still waiting for Butcher to stop bailing Harry out when he lets his temper get the best of him. There’s always at least one time where he acts too rashly and makes a new enemy, but each book also usually has a point where Harry takes hold of some great source of power, and goes nuclear with it. Afterward, he’s always deeply worried he may have killed someone in the process (which violates the First Law of Magic, apparently, and would result in his execution), but there’s always some manner in which that doesn’t happen. Someone intervenes and calms him down, or kills the target first, or whatever. At some point, his luck on that score has to run out. And now that he’s started a war between wizards and vampires, it just might.

Little surprised Butcher seems to have moved Susan to the sidelines. She was a reporter/love interest, very into the supernatural out of curiosity, and probably a desire to know and illuminate the truth about things, since most people are quite content to dismiss magic as hokum, even in a world with an openly practicing wizard (even some of the cops Harry works with think he’s a fraud). Things seemed to be progressing, and now she’s possibly going to be off-screen for awhile, due to circumstances. Don’t know if Butcher’s planning to build something between Harry and Murphy, the cop who hires him as a consultant, or if he wants to give Harry someone to pine over and rage against the vampires about.