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Blood Rites | Rating | |
| A | |||
| Jim Butcher | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| The Dresden Files | Storm Front, Fool Moon, Grave Peril, Summer Knight, Death Masks, Blood Rites, Dead Beat, Proven Guilty, White Night, Small Favor | ||
For once, Harry Dresden isn't doing too badly. He has some money - not much, but he's not in danger of being evicted - and a client in the form of a porno film producer whose actresses keep dying of the most unlikely causes. It seems like a fairly straightforward job. But then, his old friend and ally Thomas the vampire has a personal stake in this case. So much for simple...
In a way, this mystery is just as simple as that of Summer Knight. There's a problem, it needs solving. He gathers clues, finds some suspects with motive, and has to determine which of them did it.
But the wonderful parts of this have little to do with the mystery for which he is hired. It is all the side issues he finds himself involved in. The vampire Black Court is trying to kill him, and putting them in their place takes some doing and a lot of help. Far more interesting, though, is the role family plays in the story. Murphy's is in town for a family reunion of sorts, and the feelings this evokes in Little Orphan Harry are very well played. It really was a switch, but a believable one, from the usual wisecracking detective that readers know, and a change too from pointless angst over things he had no control over. This is a situation that a lot of readers will empathise with. Heck, I empathized with it, and I'm not an orphan.
As usual, there is a lot of action in the book, though significantly less than in some of the others. And as usual, we learn a bit more about Harry and his past, and his own personal story arc progresses a bit. Quite a bit, in fact; the next book will have a very different normal state to work from. Which is good. The series covers months between books, and situations should change over so much time, at least when you have as peculiar a life as Harry.
There's no one thing in this book that really stands out as spectacular. But overall, it really does add up in my opinion to something special. This is one of those rare series that never really looses steam, and I love it for that.
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