A review by kurtiskozel
Dead Beat by Jim Butcher

4.0

As the series goes on, I am kind of stumped in my thoughts on the books. The plots grow more complicated, but so do the number of Chekhov's guns. I don't doubt much of them will come up again, but I don't see why we should spend a third of this book setting them up, only to have them play a lackluster role in future books. Characters, now familiar, pop in only for character beat moments and play minor plot pieces that could have been readily resolved elsewhere. The MacGuffin grows confused, and the central thread ("the case") seems less than secondary. They're still good books and I hold them in high regard for their purpose, but the series is clearly shifting, even here, towards a character that should be more lustrous and renegade, but is bound by the hidden rules of the genre, apparently inescapable.

I'd be very pleased to see these books advance either towards a strict "sword for hire" or a strict "rogue on adventure" story, but this middle ground seems too contrived and forced for me to totally connect with the writing. Simply put, we know too much about Dresden, too much about the world, to continue believing either of them truly exist.