Ghost Story / Jim Butcher

4 out of 5 stars

When we last left the mighty wizard detective Harry Dresden, he wasn't doing well. In fact, he had been murdered by an unknown assassin.

But being dead doesn't stop him when his friends are in danger. Except now he has no body, and no magic to help him. And there are also several dark spirits roaming the Chicago shadows who owe Harry some payback of their own.

To save his friends—and his own soul—Harry will have to pull off the ultimate trick without any magic...


“You’re dead, son,” Jack said. “Cheer is contraindicated.”

Mr. Butcher, you are a manipulative man. Your writing made me cry, unnecessarily I might add, over a fictional character that I will never meet. And I think you took a lesson from the old TV show Dallas on how to kill a character without really committing yourself to what seems like the logical outcome.

In some ways, this also reminded me of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life in that Harry Dresden gets to find out how many people he mattered to and how much. It turns out he was more important to the whole city, including people who didn’t know him personally, that he would every have imagined. His powerful presence scared off a lot of bad guys who might otherwise have made Chicago their place of business.

Harry gets to view his life, his city, and his friends from an entirely new angle in this volume of the Dresden files. Remember the sleazy ectomancer, Mort, from an earlier volume? An almost throw-away character who served his purpose and hasn’t been seen since? Mortimer has come up in the world and I’m thinking he may continue to feature in future volumes. He make a good addition to the cast.

I read this book much closer in time to the last one than usual because of the cliff-hanger nature of the 12th story. I had to know what happened. Butcher took so much away from Harry during the last book. Next book, we’ll see what Mr. Dresden decides to do with this new lease on life that his author has granted him.