Cold Days, by Jim Butcher. Book fourteen of the Dresden Files.
I’m slow at getting these reviews written, and I have a feeling that the my growing book backlog is caused by a combination of my desire to not get too far behind on the reviews and the fact that most of my favourite series just got new installments. Bah! I might be making these reviews shorter in future to compensate, especially if they’re for a series that I’ve reviewed before.
Anyway, Cold Days is good. Revelations in this book explain a lot of stuff that I simply took for granted in the previous books, and shake your perception of both characters and events, and I can’t talk about any of them because every single one is a massive spoiler.
Perhaps the most interesting (non-spoilery) thing about this book is… hmm, nope, spoiler.
…
Dammit, I think this book might be one big spoiler for both itself and the rest of the series.
Ah! The Erlking shows up in a much more prominent role in this book than he has previously. The Lord of the Hunt is a fairly major power in the series, and it’s great to see a side of him which isn’t, well, hunting. Not always, anyway.
Actually, something I really like about this series is how non-monster problems take a realistic length of time to resolve (monster problems also take a realistic amount of time to resolve, but fighting a monster takes less time than recovering from a crippling injury, for example). The impact of events in Changes is the most obvious case in this book, but it’s a common theme with the series, and something that I really appreciate.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and while the implications of the plot revelations have left me a little afraid for the characters, there’s no denying that this is something that the series has been building up to for a long time. Kudos, and on to the next!
The Arcane Library 