Fool Moon by Jim Butcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I typically read 1-3 fiction books at once (depends on whether I’m caught up on my podcasts and listening to an audiobook), going back and forth between books I already own (say from Humble Bundle or Story Bundle) and books I have to buy. I don’t usually have to worry about getting confused about the plots or anything because the books are pretty different. Somehow, this time I ended up reading two supernatural detective books at the same time – this one and Dan Shambles #5. Not only that, but both books had cases involving multiple types of werewolves. The only deleterious effect is that I kept forgetting that Dresden is in Chicago instead of New Orleans.

Generally, it’s a bit hard to talk about a detective novel without spoiling anything so this’ll be pretty short. It’s been a bit since I read the first Dresden book so I kept forgetting some of what he we referring to as having happened six months ago, but I overall remembered enough about how the magic worked and how the main characters worked with each other. Butcher does a good job of reminding readers of the important details they need. We evolve each of our characters a bit and you can see that Butcher is charting out the growth arc that Dresden is going to have as well as setting up a big bad that might encompass the whole series. (As in Buffy where each episode more or less stood on its own, but each season told a coherent story as a whole with one Big Bad having been orchestrating all the shenanigans) While I wasn’t able to puzzle out the mystery before Dresden spelled it out, I felt like all the clues were there and Butcher didn’t cheat. I also thought Butcher did a great job of not making Dresden a Marty Stu or anything.

Highly recommended for anyone who likes Urban Fantasy and detective novels – it’s not really necessary to have read the first one to jump in here.

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