Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher

This Dresden file was good, but not as good as the last. I'm not going to bother recapping the previous books because there are too many, but only one thing is important to these books. Harry Dresden is a wizard, a real one, living in Chicago and fighting all sorts of badness while trying to maintain his sanity.

A newly appointed Warden for the White Council of Wizards, Harry has been set to a task of finding out where all this new black magic is coming from in Chicago. His search leads him to his friend's daughter Molly, and a scary movie convention. Horror film monsters are coming alive and killing people at the convention. Harry wants to stop them, but when a spell backfires and instead sends them to the home of his friend and more specifically to the same daughter from the movie convention, Harry knows something is terribly wrong.

Drawn into a plot, Harry, the Molly's mother Charity, Murphy and Thomas join up with some Summer faeries to raid Winter faerie kingdom in hope's of finding the girl alive. They encounter brutal monsters along the way and must fight for survival to go into the heart of Winter. Harry can't help but feel they are being used as chess pieces in some kind of plot though. Despite this he continues on as it is unacceptable for him to leave Molly in danger. Once they get her out though, there's no telling what fate will await Molly for breaking the wizarding laws.

Harry once again improves as a character in this book. There are some more Hell's Bells, but not as much as there used to be. He's also toughter and adding in the influence of his demon denarian coin Lasciel makes things interesting and him a more well-rounded character. He's also starting to lose some of his gullibility. Molly I did not like as a character. I realize Butcher had to have certain motivations for her but I just didn't really care about her as a character. The other characters had lesser parts but they were all well written.

Butcher as a writer is very descriptive. Thankfully, in his later books he has stopped detailing what Harry is wearing, what he looks like, etc. because with Harry as a narrator, it just wasn't very genuine. First person stories should not focus to much on themselves in my opinion. As far as plot goes, this book was good but somewhat unbelievable at the end.

I have come to enjoy the Dresden Files very much. They started out weak but have been getting stronger and stronger with every book. I look forward to reading the next in the series.

Proven Guilty
Copyright 2006
479 pages