Book Review: Proven Guilty - A Harry Dresden Novel

Proven Guilty (Harry Dresden Book 8)

Proven Guilty is a solid entry in the Harry Dresden series. Harry is his usual sarcastic, hard-headed, sleepless self, and a large number of regular characters make appearances somewhere along the way. People Harry cares about are put in danger, and Harry beats up monsters, the bad guys, and himself until he finally triumphs in the end.

Harry Dresden books are not the deepest, most serious you can find, but they are fun quick reads with a good sense of humor and driving plots that seldom flag.

This one has a little more going for it in the end than many of the others in the series, in fact. We find out that many loose threads in the previous books, plus a huge loose thread in this book, are tied together in some overarching bad guy plot that we can only assume will be tied up in future installments.

The loose thread in this one is so large, in fact, that for a while I kept saying to myself, "What did I miss?!?" Thankfully, Butcher comes back in the end and discusses the very question I was having, saving me from having to look for my missing brain cells, or go back and review the audio-book for the section I missed (more on that later). In fact, the only problem I had with Proven Guilty was I thought it was over, since the action had bee resolved, but it just kept going on. This was done in order to bring in the overall story arc, but I still felt a little bit like I was left hanging for a while.

As a service to readers of the series, or those who might be interested in starting, here are the books of the Dresden Files series, in order:

1. Storm Front
2. Fool Moon
3. Grave Peril
4. Summer Knight
5. Death Masks
6. Blood Rites
7. Dead Beat
8. Proven Guilty
9. White Knight
10. Small Favor
11. Turn Coat
12. Changes

I mentioned in passing that I listened to this on audio-book. I love me some audio-books. I subscribe to Audible, and I get two audio-books of any kind for an extremely reasonable price.  As I drive 90 minutes each day to and from work, I consider this a life saver. Before audio-books, I was wasting my time on boring and repetitive music radio, or sports talk that had become so crude and not about sports that I couldn't even let my children listen to it anymore.

There can be problems with audio-books, though. You get some bad readers. The reader of Proven Guilty is James Marsters (Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer!) and he is very good. Some books are not well structured to be audio-books. They have footnotes, diagrams or other quirks that require the printed word to come across correctly. You tend to miss things occasionally because you get distracted by, say, that annoying driving thing. This is a problem because it is very difficult to leaf through an audio-book looking for that section you kind of missed to find out who Petunia is and why she is trying to kill the hero.

Finally, I want to mention Jim Butcher's excellent web site. He has a lot of interesting information, not the least of which is how he structures and writes his books. Worht looking at if you are interested in writing, or even if you're just interested in how books get written!