Dresden Files: Changes

Harry Dresden has a problem…and if I told you what it was, you’d have to kill me.

Having revisited the first eleven novels in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, I grabbed the twelfth, Changes, eager to see if that last chapter was as disturbing as I’d been warned.

Now, here’s the problem. I want to tell you all about this book. I want to explain what’s going on. There are many details to linger over. But I don’t do spoilers. And in a long-running series like this, with long-running story arcs, spoilers are all over the place. But let me try.

Harry Dresden discovers that unless he acts, an innocent person dear to him is going to be killed and the world as he knows it might come to an end. But if he acts to prevent it, his chances of survival are nil.

There, was that so hard? Of course, I could say the same of many of the books in the series. The challenge here is a big one though: he has to go beard the Red Court of Vampires—pretty much all of them—in their Latin American stronghold. And though Harry’s pretty tough, the Red King hasn’t survived since prehistoric times by being a push-over.

I’ll simply add that I enjoyed the book very much; it grabbed me from the very first paragraph, and didn’t let go; and that the twist in the last chapter didn’t disturb me nearly as much as I had feared, or in the way that I had feared. Mind you, I was still calling Jim Butcher rude names.

All in all, Changes might be the best installment in the Dresden files to date. It’s certainly as good as its predecessors.

I’ve already started its successor, Ghost Story, and so far it hasn’t grabbed me. But we’ll see.