Several of my friends have enjoyed the Dresden books, and one of the highlights they mention is the audiobook performances by actor James Marsters. (We were all big fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer back in the day.) My husband also started reading the Dresden books at roughly the same time I did, enjoying them more, and consequently proceeding through them much faster. The high praise of our friends, combined with the fact that he generally listens to more audiobooks than I do, synced up at book seven. That's the point where he decided to buy the audiobook version of the next Dresden novel... and he never looked back. My husband concurred: Marsters was great, perhaps even the best audiobook performer he'd ever listened to (and he's heard a lot more than I have). That tantalizing endorsement was coupled with this suggestion: if I'd finish reading book six (which we'd already bought for e-reader), he'd be more than willing to listen to book seven again with me.
But I had to get through book six first. And I have to say, a few chapters into Blood Rites, I thought I was never going to make it.
I've gradually come to feel that Harry Dresden himself is the least interesting character in the Dresden Files. (That's unfortunate, as the books are all told from his first-person perspective.) Among his long list of grating traits, the one that trips me up the most is how persistently horny he is. Every chapter is littered with off-putting digressions about his skeevy libido. So imagine my disdain when introduced to the premise of Blood Rites: Harry Dresden is hired to work undercover on the set of a porno movie. Ugh.
The model of a Dresden novel has developed by this book to put two or three parallel jeopardies in motion all at once, so there were other plot threads in the mix here. But for the first half of the book, Jim Butcher really wasn't that interested in the side plots; the "working on a porno movie" plot took center stage. And I could barely stand it. It took all my willpower to get through one chapter every two or three days at best. I wasn't sure I could take one more sentence of being inside Harry Dresden's head.
But somehow, I did eventually power through. And remarkably, it eventually did seem to be worth it. The back half of Blood Rites ends up developing into a murder mystery with supernatural trappings, and it delves into more of Dresden's back story than any book before. Better still, the book makes excellent use of established recurring characters in the Dresden universe, particularly police officer Karrin Murphy (who has long been a bright spot of the series for me) and vampire Thomas (who I understand is a favorite with many fans, and now I begin to see why). Blood Rites managed to serve up a reasonably satisfying "solution" to the mystery, and at the same time it seemed to introduce more lasting consequences for Dresden than any book so far: issues that later books will have to engage with and develop.
In short, the first half of the book was, in my view, the worst Dresden Files material I'd read yet. And the second half was easily the best. It's hard to take that all in at once, but to make myself put a mark on it, I'd call the book a B- overall. That being an uptick from how I felt about the last couple books, it doesn't seem like I should stop now. Plus, I've reached that milestone I was trying to reach: I can listen to the audiobook of the next novel, and find out if James Marsters is the secret ingredient that's been missing for me all this time.
That said... my husband and I have a pretty long queue of audiobooks we want to listen to together (and only so much time in the car together to do so), so Dresden Files book seven might not reach the top of the list any time soon. Stay tuned...
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