Storm Front

Author:  Jim Butcher

Begun: May 28th 2025

Finished: June 4th 2025

Type: Audiobook on Libby

Narrator: James Marsters

Rating: 7/10

Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden is a wizard who works in modern Chicago.  He's the only wizard in the yellow pages.  He struggles to make rent, so when a housewife comes and asks for his aid in finding her husband, he takes the job.  Meanwhile, there's some really weird murders going on, with people clearly killed by magic.  Furthermore the White Council think Dresden's a bad guy and have set an anal retentive magic-sword wielder to watch his every move.  

Written like a hardboiled detective novel with the added spice of magic, Storm Front has some really fun scenes of arcane power.  

The story itself was good in the beginning, really dragged from about 40 - 80%, and then picked up in the last bit.  I had the speed up to 1.5x to get through the boring bit, but slowed it back down to 1x at around 95%.  

The whole book itself was fine.  For most people I think this would be an easy 8 or 9/10.  For me it was just ok.  

The ending, however, was EXTREMELY satisfactory in the way that a lot of books aren't these days.  Everything was tidied up nicely and I LIKE that very much.  The ending itself brought the book up from a 5 or 6/10 to a 7/10.  The ending was, in fact, so well done, I'm not discounting the possibility of reading a sequel at some point. 

James Marsters was excellent as the narrator.