I've bought and read the three first books. I think the mystery part of them are predictable, the fantasy part even more so. The good parts of the books are the persons. While none of them are very original (the down on his luck detective, the butch but caring female cop and the go-getter female journalist) they are done in a way that I like.


But the worst part of it all in my opinon is having Dresden stumbling along EVERY SINGLE time and just barely pulling something out of his ass to save the day, time and time again.


That beeing said, I also like the writing and the fact that the author manages to keep the "cast" relatively small, something both crime- and fantasy-writers often have a problem managing.

Contrary to what you seem to think, I actually enjoyed the first book more then the second and third, because the second and third are so similar in build to the first, that I felt they were just repeating the first book. Only with different monsters this time around.


The third one was pretty decent, but once again a "tapped out" Dresden manages to save the day in the end.. just barely. I understand that the action needs to be tightly packed and quickly paced to keep the tension up, but with Dresden almost down and out at the end of (almost) every single encounter, it gets old fast.


So old infact, that I won't be buying the rest of the series.

 

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I can't imagine it would be interesting reading a book where the protagonist wins easily.

 

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That's the only other option you can think of?


I would have liked to see an epic struggle kind of thing with Harry at full power, but fighting someone nearly as strong.


To me it reads like: "Ok if he had that up his sleeve, why didn't he use it earlyer and win easy?"


The obvious answer is that he has more fight up ahead and need to conserve strenght, but how does he know when to pull all the stops? - I mean he almost dies every time.

 

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To be perfectly honest, while I disagree about his opinion of Butcher's writing, I do agree that I'd have liked to see Dresden hulk out a bit more than he has so far. Every now and then it's just nice to see the hero kick some ass. I'm not saying make anything easier on him, just give him a few more fights where he kicks someones ass.

One of the problems I have with Butcher's books (and many many other authors) is fights that end in stalemate, I hate when the protagonists fail to gain anything from an otherwise positive series of events. This has always driven me nuts in Wheel of Time, what good is winning fights and defeating the forces of darkness if they just respawn infinitely?

There are entire plot arcs where the heroes gain nothing because the antagonist just comes right back. This happens in Desden books on a smaller but consistent scale. When something is the primary enemy of a book I do not want to see them schlep off then show back up.

I hate when Dresden throws tons of spells and fireballs around and accomplishes nothing. The enemies in those books tend to be invulnerable to harm until we reach the culmination. When he was fighting that Indian voodoo creature I about put the book down because we had 100 pages worth of combat in which absolutely nothing was accomplished.

The combat in general in the Dresden books has gotten tedious and uninteresting for me and I think a part of that is I know after 40 pages of fighting not one damned thing will have been accomplished.

 

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Btw, let me empahsize. I don't think the books are crap. I enjoyed reading them. But they didn't have that little extra _for me_ , so I won't be buying the rest.

 

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if you want to see dresden cut loose more and win more on his own power you need to read the later books. hes growing as a wizard and hes much more talented by book 10 than he is in book 2 or 3.

 

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I will have to check this wizard out!


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