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38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent as always, 30 Mar 2007
First, if you've never read a Dresden File novel and you're contemplating buying Proven Guilty then don't. This is not a series you can simply dip into at any point and pick up the story so far. Over the previous seven books (this is number eight) Jim Butcher has created a fully realised, deeply detailed world with a wealth of back-story. Trying to follow the events of this or any of the other Dresden Files without knowledge of everything that has gone before will be almost impossible. You will also miss out on some hugely entertaining stories and some wonderful character development. Go and read Storm Front, the first in the series, and work through the rest in order until you reach this latest adventure. You will not regret it.....
....because Proven Guilty is yet another excellent trip into the world of Harry Dresden and friends. As this series progresses and matures I am enjoying it more and more. The wealth of carefully crafted back story and characterisation lends this book, like Dead Beat before it, great depth. You feel fully immersed in the world Butcher has created, and its a wonderfully colourful and textured place to visit. Its a shame when you have to leave.
Its not as if Butcher is resting on his laurels though. Like the books the precede it Proven Guilty has its own identity. There is less of the bombast or large scale action of Dead Beat, and not as much outright horror as some of the other novels. This is very much a book aimed at progressing characters, relationships and wider plot elements. At times this makes it feel like something of a transitionary effort; intended to get wider events from point A to point B as quickly and with as little fuss as possible, but even if that is the case it does it well and entertainingly. The central plot, dealing with black magic & teenage rebellion, may be slight compared to Dead Beat for example (there's no world saving for Harry to do this time) but its engaging. It also carries far greater significance than it apparently slight and intensely personal nature at first implies.
Something that the book as a whole also does. As it unfolds Proven Guilty becomes a chance for Butcher to pick up on a lot of the plot elements he has put in place over the past seven novels. Seemingly disparate elements, some of them going right back to the earliest days of the series and almost forgotten now, are suddenly brought up and given far greater significance as a result of seemingly low key events during the course of the book. Pieces of a larger and hitherto unseen jigsaw, including the war between vapires and wizards and the politics of Faerie, begin to slot into place, until by the end a whole new backstory has emerged that will give Harry's adventures a entirely new spin.
Harry himself also undergoes some significant character development during the course of the book, as do some of the other key players in his world. He also finds time to 'resolve' some critical personal issues as well as developing some completely new and interesting ones.
So overall Proven Guilty may not have th glorious action set pieces to rival some of the earlier Dresden Books and may appear far more low key, but for fans of the series it is revealing, exciting and fascinating. It also sets up a protentially great new phase in Harry's adventures and one I can't wait to experience.
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26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great new Dresden book, 22 May 2006
In this one, Harry is warned by the gatekeeper that there is black magic in Harry's neighbourhood... or their will be very soon. Messing around with time is forbidden, but that never really bothered the gatekeeper, so Harry takes the warning seriously.
The war with the vampires is getting serious now with no quarter asked or given. The white council, of which Harry is now a member, gives their newest warden (Harry) a job to do. He must find out why the summer and winter courts are not helping the council against the vampires. They need the help badly. The problem is, every time Harry gets involved with the never never and its politics, he ends up over his head and in debt to someone too powerful to live with. Literally!
He asks help from his friends the summer knight and summer lady, but they are under a geas not to help directly. So who walks into the bar and into their meeting? The winter lady!! None other than the wife of the winter knight, the man Harry destroyed in recent times and the opposite to his friend the summer knight. Things go from bad to worse when his best friend's daughter is kidnapped and taken to the winter court, leaving Harry no choice but to mount a rescue. Things come to a climax in the Winter Queen's stronghold, where he slaps Queen Mab in the face (not literally thank god) by unleashing summer magic at the very heart of her domain. To top it all, the girl he is looking to save might be the very black magic user he is oath bound to kill!!
A must read for all Dresden fans.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
As bad as Fool Moon, 26 Jun 2007
I read this feeling as though I'd missed a book somewhere along the line. Butcher casually deals with a number of things that happened off-page, which turn out to have a certain level of importance for this plot-line. For example, there's a scene where Dresden meets up with the Winter Lady, Maeve and he talks about something that Maeve tried to pull at Billy the Werewolf's wedding, using it as a bargaining chip. Because we haven't seen what happened at the wedding, it's something that has no power or air of credibility to it and it feels like a desperate attempt by Butcher to pull his plot along.
Butcher also continues the Murphy/Dresden romance angle, which irritated me in Dead Beat. The whole thing is shaping up as one of those Tragic Romances That Were Never Meant To Be and it is such a cliche.
Female characters are still a big problem for Butcher, and I was particularly disappointed with what he did with Molly Carpenter. Previously a bright, somewhat precocious teenager in Death Masks, she's now become the stereotypical teenage cliche - running away from home, having tattoos and piercings, blah blah blah. Her mother, Charity, fares a little better - her opposition to Harry at least gets an explanation now (albeit one that's somewhat radioed in) and you see her as a warrior woman in her own right, but then Butcher has her succumb to the 'everyone likes Harry' theme that pervades the books because really, we're all supposed to believe that Harry is a wicked cool guy and no-one on the side of right can dislike him without being an obvious schmuck.
It's Murphy however who gets the roughest ride because what happens to her is obviously supposed to fit into the wider story-arc, but it's been handled in a way that's so utterly lame that I came close to throwing the book at a wall in disgust.
The plot itself rambles. Butcher's trying to do two things - firstly, building on his backstory by fleshing out Harry's new role as a warden and his discomfort with his involvement with the White Council whilst pushing him further into it; and secondly by developing the war between the Red Court and White Council by showing the involvement of the Faeries and other entities whilst at the same time hinting that there may be an uber-villain behind it all who's pulling everyone's strings. The way he chooses to do both these things is by having a main plot strand of someone bringing horror movie villains to life to scare and kill horror fan patrons. The problem is that this main hook isn't fat enough to sustain Butcher's aims and in fact, he seems to lose interest with his main plot as he confuses it by bringing Molly into his backstory. The result is that whilst Butcher carries the reader through the book at his usual breakneck pace, the story itself is unsatisfying. Once again, Butcher is trying to jump-cut his main story arc so that he can take you to the next significant segment and once again, he's doing it in a lazy and unsatisfying way.
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