They're also a little more grown-up and a lot darker than they used to be. The usual themes on the possibility of redemption, the need for hope, the opportunity for corruption and the reality of loss are all there. Woven into this, sometimes a little heavy-handedly (seriously - let's have a discussion on whether Harry is a monster or not which he over-hears because no one notices that he's no longer unconscious?) are discussions about who Harry has become and what his options are. The plotting is truly Byzantine with constantly shifting perspectives on who the good guys are and what the bad guys want and how any of it is going to work out.
The quest format gives Harry some wonderful set-piece duels against various configurations of bad guys, all described with a vim and gusto that made me smile.
In "Skin Game" Jim Butcher gives us the traditional heroic quest but with a twist: he turns the quest into a heist and heroes into villains, with Harry working with them. Or at least, he's moving in the right direction. Then, eighteen months later, "Skin Game" came out and I decided to give it at try as an audiobook. Like many of the people around him, I almost walked away from Harry Dresden at the end of "Cold Days". the monster killer, the White Council rebel, the man who always tried to do the right thing - which somehow always meant blowing a LOT of stuff up. That didn't prevent me from both disliking the broken Harry Dresden I was being presented with and from mourning the Harry we all used to have: the wizard for hire. Dresden's actions in "Changes" had consequences for them all. I admired Jim Butcher for following through on the storyline and the character progression, not just of Dresden but of his friends and his enemies. I started to dislike Dresden in those two books. Dresden came back as a literal shadow of his former self in "Ghost Story" and then all the way back in "Cold Days" when he transformed fully into "The Winter Knight", a role that he'd previously protected people from. I should have remembered, long-term Stephen King fan that I am, that sometimes they come back.
I assumed, at the end of "Changes" that one of the consequences was no more Harry Dresden. He executed the woman he loved knowing that, through this act, he would destroy thousands of people (fairly nasty vampires for the most part) in an instant. Probably the best book in the Dresden Files. Harry Dresden died, way back in 2010, four books ago, in "Changes - The Dresden Files #12".
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