Part comedy, part old school noir detective novel and all parts magic and mayhem. That is probably one of the best descriptions I can come up with for this next book. Storm Front is book one of the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher that revolves around the adventures of Harry Dresden. It just so happens that Harry is a wizard for hire, kind of like a magic private investigator, and it also happens that he is the only one in the Chicago yellow pages. The book opens with him worrying about bills and expenses when he has two seemingly disparate cases dropped into his lap. One is a bizarre set of murders where the victims had their hearts literally ripped out of their chests. The other is a housewife that wants to find out what is going on with her husband. Things rapidly get complicated though when Harry Dresden is warned by an enforcer for the mysterious white council that he is a suspect for the murders before he is then warned by a mob boss to stop investigating as well. If that wasn’t bad enough he then has to deal with mysterious magical drugs and random demon summonings.
I was not sure what to expect when I started reading this book but I will say that I really enjoyed this book overall. The book went by incredibly quickly and I honestly felt like it was way shorter than it actually was. It was a surprisingly easy read that was really enjoyable. When I said that it was part noir detective novel I wasn’t kidding as that really is what it felt like a lot of the times. Harry Dresden is this barely making it by private investigator who is skeptical of almost everything and everybody and doesn’t like letting people close. Does that not sound kind of familiar? The one thing that kind of throws that out the window is that he can randomly cast magic such as large gusts of wind and has a talking skull in his basement laboratory. Of all the things to have as a best friend but hey if it works. I also mentioned comedy because Harry is also the kind of guy who doesn’t seem to think things through and rarely has a plan so things always end up getting all kinds of cock-eyed and screwed up, usually in amusing ways. As for the magic and mayhem description I think that would be fairly obvious after the description I provided but the story really does revolve around those themes as there is a lot of magic and mayhem throughout the story. The story was actually really good and rather intricate as well. I feel like it did a good job of interweaving and connecting the cases that Harry Dresden was investigating throughout the story. However, there were several elements that I felt could have been fleshed out a little better. There was very little information provided about this mysterious white council beyond the fact that they had the right to potentially punish Harry Dresden if he had misused magic but it doesn’t provide the background on why they supposedly had this right. I also felt like there could have been more depth and detail provided about how the magic system in this world works. There was some explanation provided but not always a lot. I am hoping that both of these things are topics or themes that are explored in more depth in later books in the series. I would give this a solid four out of five stars.
This book is one that would be a weird crossover of genres. It is technically fantasy and I could totally support that classification but it is also definitely a detective novel as well in a lot of ways. If you happen to be a reader who enjoys either of those genres than I think you might enjoy this book and I would recommend that you try it. However, I would also add that the noir detective elements make it rather different than the stereotypical urban fantasy that you may be used to. In terms of age range I would recommend that it should probably only be read by adults or older teenagers as there are some rather graphic scenes, not always violent but definitely graphic. Overall, a great book and a great start to a series so I can definitely see why it is so popular. Feel free to share your thoughts on the series in the comments as I am curious if anyone else is familiar with the series.