Turn Coat

The thing about Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels is that while they are light reads, they are also nourishing in a way that only the best blockbusters are. I’m not talking Simon West or Stephen Sommers, but guys like James Cameron or the BOURNE movies by Paul Greengrass. They have a brain, a heart, and they engage you without asking you to check your brain at the door the way you would with a James Patterson or Dan Brown novel. If you don’t want to be engaged by your fiction … man, I don’t know what to tell you. Try hard drugs — it’s the same effect and often more interesting an experience.

The setup for TURN COAT — the 11th of a projected 20 — is so simple that I love it: A big-time warden named Morgan, a sort of police officer for wizards, collapses onto maverick wizard Dresden’s doorstep and gasps, “Help me. The wardens are after me.”

Isn’t that just an awesome hook?

Now, the thing is, I hate fantasy.* I can’t get past all the songs in the LORD OF THE RINGS books. I gag at the word “destiny.” I don’t feel threatened or interested in a poorly defined dark lord of darkness and evil (Sauron was a giant eye, people; Sauraman was a far more interesting villain in the movies), and realistically, the little guy does not save the day as much as fantasy writers copying Tolkien would like you to believe. All that bores me and makes me want to reach for a razor.

Butcher is different. “Destiny” is never uttered in Dresden’s world — at least not about our hero. He’s not some nameless nobody; he packs serious power and is respected by the right people, so you can expect him to be a hero. What makes the series genius is that Harry has our problems: He worries about his relationships, he has bills to pay, and the politics of his world might get his head chopped off or he’ll die some other horrible death.

Okay, that last one isn’t so common, but you get the idea.

In TURN COAT, Harry has to get proactive and figure out who framed Morgan for murder. It’s important because this person is also the long-rumored traitor of the White Council, the guys who are the bosses of wizards. Butcher has always danced a delicate line between noir and fantasy with these books, and while he doesn’t always succeed at mixing the two, at least there’s an honest-to-God mystery in this one.

Granted, you’ll figure out the killer as soon as he’s introduced, if you’re paying attention. The culprit might as well have had a glowing Vegas billboard pointed at him, screaming, “TRAITOR! MURDERER! GET THE BASTARD!” Still, I admire the effort, and it feels more like a P.I. novel than these books have felt in a long while, and I love that Butcher references Hercule Poiroit at the end.

Figuring out the mystery might have been easy, but Butcher is a smart writer, and it doesn’t end there; the ramifications of a traitor being revealed opens up a whole new can of worms, and the White Council** wants to keep the fact that there’s a traitor hush-hush because they would appear weak in the supernatural world. For them, pride is more important than protecting their own.

I love the world he sets up; it’s rich and complicated (seriously, Wikipedia is your friend with these books), and often feels real. It’s a pity that a great city like Chicago gets the short shrift, though, as it often just feels like Big Urban City, USA, the way Butcher writes it. A big component of any P.I. series is making the setting a living and breathing part of the cast, but it’s one of the most noticeable flaws in this series.

He makes up for it with how big the world he created for Harry is, however; it’s like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland. He also uses real mythology very well; here, an ancient, Native American evil spirit called a skinwalker is stalking Harry, and Butcher handles the mythology of such a beast with deft cleverness.

Which brings me to the action: Wow. I love Butcher’s action scenes. They’re big and epic and he handles them with the expertise of a director like James Cameron. It’s big when it needs to be, personal when it needs to be, and brutal when it needs to be. Logically, you know Harry will always survive, but you often don’t know how he possibly could.

But the only reason you should care about the action is because Butcher writes such great characters. He often compares Dresden to Peter Parker, and it shows. He’s a smart-ass who will always go the distance, even if it breaks him in every way possible. Butcher’s characterization is so good that when Harry says goodbye to a woman he might be in love with, before going off to fight a battle he might not come back from, it’s emotional and hits the reader hard because Butcher earns it. The people in his books are often three-dimensional. Sure, his villains are often evil just because, but he makes up for it by making everyone else not totally good or bad, and often just out for themselves.

Butcher is a great burger at a nice diner: fulfilling and tasty, and you don’t hate yourself for it the next morning as you digest it. —Cameron Hughes

*I’ll hunt anyone down that starts whining to me about Harry Potter. Shut. Up. Same with George R.R. Martin.

**If the dreadful TV series did anything right, it was renaming The White Council into the High Council so it no longer sounded like a Klan meeting.

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• THE DRESDEN FILES: STORM FRONT — VOLUME ONE: THE GATHERING STORM by Jim Butcher and Mark Powers
• THE DRESDEN FILES: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE by Jim Butcher
• PROVEN GUILTY by Jim Butcher
• SMALL FAVOR by Jim Butcher
• SPIDER-MAN: THE DARKEST HOURS by Jim Butcher
• WHITE NIGHT by Jim Butcher

Related posts:

1. The Dresden Files: Storm Front — Volume One: The Gathering Storm
2. The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle
3. Proven Guilty
4. White Night
5. Evil Ways