I haven't been posting as many book reviews as I might have because I've been ripping through the Dresden Files series. They're not brilliant, but they're good.
A friend of mine worked on the Yellow Pages for some smallish community. If you looked up Super Heroes it said "See: Wayne, Bruce". No, really.
Pick up the Chicago Yellow Pages and look up "wizards". That's where you'll find Harry Dresden. He doesn't do shows or kids parties or give lessons. He's not the only wizard. He's just the only one listed. He gets a lot of private detective type work. Find this, find that. He mostly pays is bills doing consulting work for the Special Investigations division of the Chicago PD.
SI is to the Chicago PD what the X-Files was to the FBI. They get the stuff too weird for the rest of the department and if you're sent there it's because you're not very popular but they can't fire you yet. Typically once you file a report or two about stuff that can't happen they have reason to fire you.
Harry is aided by a fairy in a skull who has many lifetimes of magical knowledge and gets paid in romance novels.
As the series starts Harry isn't popular. Many people think he's scamming the cops. Most of the rest of the wizards want to kill him because he used black magic to kill his teacher in self defense. If it wasn't self defense they would have killed him instantly.
As the series progresses we see him go up against a couple of different kinds of vampires, a variety of werewolves, the mafia, fairy queens, zombies, demons, ghouls, and skirt the edges of a war between the wizards and the red vampires (Buffy style) which he helped start. He meets his half brother, loses a girlfriend, matches wits his Fairy (note the big "F") godmother.
The first several books are numbered. Then the numbering stops. It really shouldn't stop since they still need to be read in order.
1) Storm Front
2) Fool Moon
3) Grave Peril
4) Summer Knight
5) Death Masks
6) Blood Rites
7) Dead Beat
8) Proven Guilty
9) White Night
See also Simon Green's Nightside series for a much darker variation of this theme.
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