Jim Butcher, White Night [Library of Babel]

I stopped by to support my local independent bookseller yesterday, and was immediately confronted with a dilemma: A big display of signed copies of White Night by Jim Butcher, the new Dresden Files novel. The signed part has nothing to do with the dilemma-- I'm a reader, not a collector-- the dilemma was that I haven't been buying these in hardcover, and it's only out in hardcover. But I've really been in the mood for a Dresden Files book lately, especially since the Rob Thurman book mentioned previously turned out to be so unsatisfactory.

As you can tell, I ended up buying it, and tore through it yesterday afternoon. It's a pretty credible entry in the series, with Harry being called in by his old friend Karrin Murphy to investigate the mysterious deaths of a number of women, who turn out to be connected to a magic-using group called the Ordo Lebes:

"Ordo Lebes," Murphy said. She took the lid off her coffee and blew some steam away from its surface. "My Latin is a little rusty."

"That's because you aren't a master of arcane lore, like me."

She rolled ehr eyes. "Right."

"Lebes means a large cooking pot," I told her. I tried to adjust the passenger seat of her car, but couldn't manage to make it comfortable. Saturn coupes were not meant for people my height. "Translates out to the Order of the Large Cooking Pot."

"Or maybe Order of the Cauldron?" Murphy suggested. "Since it sounds so much less sill and has a more witchy connotation and all?"

Of course, this ends up being about more than just somebody with a grudge against witches...

By the end of the book, Harry has had to contend with ghouls, vampires, demons, and an impressive number of sinister plots, some of which are only partly revealed. Of course, if you've been reading the series thus far, you know that this only accounts for about half of the mystical powers in the Dresden universe, so it's not quite as over-the-top as that list might sound. It still makes for an impressive setpiece battle at the end, though.

The action here does represent a clear advance in the overall plot of the series (though it remains somewhat unclear where it's advancing to), which is good. It also, wonder of wonders, clears up at least one point in the massive amount of backstory that has accumulated through the previous eight books. I'm not entirely wild about the way it was handled, but given the rate at which Harry has been accreting powers and problems, I think it's a Good Thing on balance, lest future volumes consist of nothing but explanations of what happened in the previous books.

It's not without its flaws-- Harry's a little too slick at times, particularly with his apprentice, and some of the heavy hitters hit implausible heavily, if that makes any sense-- but it was pretty much exactly what I was looking for on Saturday.