And then he was dead. Ish. .

Of course the ending of Changes couldn’t be the end of Dresden. And after Ghost Story, I think I can forgive Butcher for that cliff hanger. Mostly. :)

Thematically, it’s a different sort of story, with Dresden mostly without any of his usual tools of the trade and having to learn a whole new set of rules for how the rules work. After the crazy power spike he got throughout Changes, it’s something that needed to happen and I think it was done well.

On top of that, we get all of the fall out. Turns out, when you operate on Dresden’s scale and when you take out an entire race of bad guys, you create something of a massive void. And now his friends have to deal with it.

Among the developments of Ghost Story is bringing Mortimer Lindquist (it’s funny because ‘mort’ or something similar means death in many Romance languages) to the forefront. Just trying to stay alive makes sense in the darkness that is the Dresdenverse and yet in the end, he still comes through for the good guys. He had a nice character arc, particularly for what was previously a minor, annoying character.

We also get a previous bad guy back again. No spoilers, but given the subject matter (dead things), it’s guessable. It was nice to see the fallout of previous problems like that come up again. I have a feeling we’ll be feeling that throughout the rest of the series.

All together, it wasn’t my favorite book in the series–it’s just too different. On the other hand, it’s a good way to hit the reset button on a fair bit of power creep and shift the Dresden Files to a new normal. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes next…