Turn Coat by Jim Butcher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book combines the two types of Dresden novels into one. It’s both a story concerned with the overarching Dresden plot and a typical detective case. As the back of the book blurb says, this time it’s Morgan (Dresden’s nemesis on the White Council) who “hires” Harry to clear him of murder charges. Doing so brings together plot points from previous books (going as far back as Summer Knight) and gets us to resolve the first climactic part of the story Butcher has been telling over these past 11 novels.

We end the novel in a new state of affairs and, cliche as it sounds, nothing will be the same for Dresden afterwards. Well, not “nothing”, but there’s quite a few status quo changes. If you’re reading this before reading the book, I would suggest picking up Side Jobs. There are a few short stories in there that make plot points in this book hit harder.

I recently saw somewhere (maybe the Dresden subreddit) that Butcher intended the series to follow similar track as Buffy (and another story I can’t remember now) where it started off somewhat silly and slowly got more serious as the series moved along. This book definitely seems like a potential inflection point. I think, as long as Butcher still keeps some of the levity, he can keep the series from becoming a slog. We’ll see what the next six (already published) books hold…



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