Recommended Reading: 'Proven Guilty' by Jim Butcher

I finished the latest episode in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series the other night, and it was fantastic.

I have to admit I was worried when I picked up the book and saw that the page count seemed to have doubled and the print seemed to have noticeably shrunk since the previous volume.

Had Butcher - or, perhaps more pertinently, Butcher's editors - succumbed to celebrity author syndrome, in which a writer's rise to best-seller prominence renders their prose apparently sacrosanct - untouchable by the red pen of editorial common sense - whether it really needs to be or not..?

My fears proved unfounded. Yes, Proven Guilty is a much longer Harry Dresden tale than any of its predecessors, but the good news is that it doesn't feel like it is. It's still the same dose of slick, polished, adrenaline-fuelled prose, with all the hallmarks of a damn good Harry Dresden novel: action, intrigue, heroism, wisecracks, and mystically magical shenanigans galore.

The reason for all those extra pages is that by now - eight volumes in and still going strong - there's an awful lot of back-story for Jim Butcher to remind his readers of. And very sensibly he takes a bit of time to fill in the majority of the potential blanks; taking account of the possibility that this is either the reader's first exposure to the Dresdenverse, or that they may well have read a lot of other fiction in-between instalments, and that their creaking, story-stuffed memories might not be capable of keeping absolutely everything in perfect order. Jim, thank you. My brain appreciates it.

Anyway, I'm not going to say anything about the plot, save that it contains some extremely interesting character developments and sets up all sorts of potentially intriguing story-arcs for future volumes. This really is a series that could run and run.

If, like me, you're a huge fan of The Dresden Files already, then... well, you'll probably have read this one as soon as it hit the bookstores. But if it's still lurking on a 'to-be read' shelf because perhaps you, too were a bit worried by the potential implications of both page-count growth and font-size shrinkage, then don't be shy. Grab it down, dust it off, put the kettle down and settle in for a session. I reckon you'll fly through it, and you'll be glad you did.

And if you're not a Dresden Files fan quite yet, well, you could start here, but you'd be better off following my earlier advice, and starting with the first book in the series. Like I say, there's a lot of back-story to catch up on by now, and a lot of it is really, really good...

Filed on: April 17, 2007
Filed under: Books
Tagged with: Jim-Butcher | The-Dresden-Files |

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