Summer Knight by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Things continue to evolve in Dresden’s Chicago. By this point it’s become obvious to me that the main series (as opposed to short stories) requires the reader to read them all in order rather than just jumping in to any particular case. Like a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, each story builds upon the previous one. This one contains characters from Fool Moon playing a huge part, a deal that Dresden made in Grave Peril forcing a big part of the plot, and both women in his life only have resonance if you’ve been reading since the first book.
As far as the case, I think it proceeds on a good pace. While, as usual, I couldn’t solve it ahead of time, all the clues are there for you to trace back and see that Jim Butcher isn’t cheating. This one involves The Fae and so it’s a good thing that over the past 3 years of fantasy humble bundle books, I’ve been learning about faerie rules. They do a decent job explaining stuff, but knowing that there are Summer and Winter Sidhe Courts ahead of time allowed me to just focus on the story.
As I was recommending this book to a fellow SF fan, I realized that this book (and the series so far up to this book) is VERY male-gaze-y. It doesn’t bother me, but knowing about that (and this book was – SURPRISINGLY – written almost TWENTY years ago), does make me think twice before recommending it if the person might take that the wrong way.
Anyway, I’m definitely enjoying the series and it’s on to book 5 whenever that shows up in my To-Read list.
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