A Foolish Endeavor

As promised, after working my way around a few other books, I circled back to the Dresden Files series to follow-up my good experience with the first book. In the second installment, Fool Moon, author Jim Butcher picks up the action a few months later. It sees Harry Dresden get tangled up in a series of murders taking place each month at the full moon. A werewolf would seem to be the culprit... but there's more at play than it would seem.

Having set up the world of the series in Storm Front, you'd expect the sequel to settle in more with a story less dependent on exposition and set up. Fool Moon both fulfills and thwarts that expectation. On the plus side, many characters set up in the first book reappear, and their relationships with the main character continue to evolve. There's a satisfying blend of episodic and serialized storytelling -- this isn't a television procedural where all the characters reset to zero for each new installment... but neither do they grow in the leaps and bounds that would be more appropriate to a close-ended series. It's good to have back police officer Karrin Murphy, crime boss Johnny Marcone, and comedically temperamental spirit Bob.

The new characters that populate this tale aren't nearing as compelling. Much of the story revolves around Tera, a woman who is supposed to be mysterious and strong-willed, but still manages to come off mostly vacant and sexualized. There's a gang of werewolf characters who are unfortunately too ill-defined and interchangeable to leave much of an impression. The only one to stick out much from the (heh) pack does so more for his conspicuously youthful name (Billy) than any sort of personality that pops him off the page.

The plot is less breezy and straightforward than book one. While complicating the narrative isn't an inherently bad choice, here it takes the form of a great deal of exposition about the rules of werewolves in the Dresden Files universe -- how many types there are and what are the differences between them. Some of it is necessary information for the story, and the rest is likely smokescreen to make things less predictable for the reader. But the whole comes off as a pretty thick brick of a lesson that you need to assimilate to follow the story.

So overall, I didn't find Fool Moon to be as fun a read as Storm Front. Still, it was far from a slog. I flew through it quickly -- and with enough goodwill left on the other side -- to be interested in continuing the Dresden Files series. But again, as after book one, I'll probably read a few other things before coming back to it. I'd say Fool Moon is a B-. In a series of more than a dozen books and counting, if this is one of the weaker ones, it's not so low a mark.