That brought me to book five, Death Masks. It sees Harry Dresden hired to track the theft of the Shroud of Turin. At the same time, he juggles the return of an old flame, a challenge from a rival to a duel to the death, and the capture of a friend by a dangerous new enemy.
Death Masks is a jam-packed book. More than the four prior books, it feels to me like the moment where a television producer would have looked and had the "this could really be a TV series" thought that inspired the 2007 effort (that lasted just one season). This novel totally has the feeling of a made-to-binge season of Netflix television, with multiple soap-operatic plot threads woven throughout the "episodes" of the novel, in a lead-up to a massive "season finale" that also serves as a cliffhanger for "next season."
I found it a little too dense -- at least, for the way I was reading it, a chapter or two most nights before sleep. With so many plot elements in play at once, I found the "turn taking" between them tough to keep up with. As different subplots would come into focus, I'd find myself sometimes struggling to remember the situations surrounding them when they last appeared several chapters earlier. I suspect it's not that the plot was really that complex, but rather that it just wasn't holding my interest.
The problem, I'm beginning to suspect, is the constant on every page of a Dresden Files book -- the character of Harry Dresden himself. He's far and away the least compelling thing in the series. Surprisingly not bright, not as witty as he thinks he is, and perpetually horny, I just don't really enjoy reading his first-person narrative for hundreds of pages. I'm much more drawn to the vast (and growing!) cast of secondary characters that pop in and out over the course of a Dresden book. My interest in a particular subplot seems fairly proportional to which side characters figure largest in that subplot.
I'm particularly drawn (no surprise) to the characters who seem to offer the most challenge to the behavioral rut Harry Dresden is entrenched in. This book gives us noble Knight of the Cross Shiro, introduces smart and savvy thief Anna Valmont, and gives more page count to Charity Carpenter (wife of knight Michael) than earlier books. To varying degrees, all of these characters spend much of the book asking Dresden why he must always be the way that he is, and I'm so here for that.
Of course, I can't realistically expect Dresden to stop being so Dresdeny, so this probably means that I should just accept this book series isn't for me and give up, right? Well... probably. But the thing is, Death Masks just introduced a major villain who (small spoiler) escapes at the end of the book to surely return again. So, as lovers of the series have suggested, it does indeed appear that this is the moment that things are going to pick up. Yeah, I kinda do want to know what happens next.
On the other hand... I probably can't have high hopes for a series that's completely centered on one character that I'm really growing to loathe. Yet, having perhaps now identified exactly what it is about these books that isn't working for me, can I better compartmentalize that when I read the next book, to focus more on the things I like? We probably can't drop much lower than the C+ I think I'd give this book, can we?
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