Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files, #8) by Jim Butcher

The wizard Harry Dresden continues to anger the White Council, the Red Court of Vampires, the winter court of the Fey and pretty much everyone else in the universe. He and Bob have a new (dangerous) project in his work space. He’s worried about his half-brother, Thomas, who has been acting kind of weird and may or may not be feeding off of people again. He and Murphy are starting to talk about their interesting relationship and there’s a fallen angel in the concrete of his house. Could things get much worse?

Yeah, it could. When Michael’s daughter begins to have problems, Harry has to deal with those too.

First, he has to witness an execution of an evil magic user by the council. It makes him sick to his stomach because the boy was never trained and didn’t know that what he was doing was wrong. It reminds Harry of his own questionable past and how close he came to the same fate.

“But it doesn’t change the fact that we’ve just murdered a boy who probably never knew enough to understand what was happening to him.” pg 15

The White Council is so stretched by the war with the vampires, they’ve giving less time to social niceties than perhaps they able to in the past. They’ve also been able to train fewer wizards. And there’s a new threat running around Chicago that Harry has been tasked to discover.

“As the senior Warden in the region, it falls to you to investigate and find those responsible. In my opinion, it is vital that you do so immediately. To my knowledge, no one else is aware of the situation.” pg 29

I really enjoyed this entry in the series until the end of the story arc with Michael’s daughter. That part felt off to me and crossed a line that I didn’t know I had for these books.

In my mind, The Dresden Files are sort of the “junk food” of my to-be-read pile. The hero of the stories is not perfect and admittedly so. He’s kind of a dog when it comes to women and relationships. He tries to make the right decisions but it sometimes back fires in his face. But I usually agree with what he tries to do and understand his motivations behind it.

But the way that he treats Michael’s daughter… I didn’t agree with that. There’s a kind way to go about things and a cruel way, and I felt like he unnecessarily chose the cruel way. It’s not what I look for in my “junk food” reads. Plus, the whole scene gave me the creeps and made me feel like I didn’t know the character after all.

And perhaps that was the point. Sometimes Harry does the wrong thing. Sometimes he thinks the wrong thing. But at the end of the day, in this book at least, he didn’t make a different type of unforgivable mistake.

That being said, if he lived in my world, I wouldn’t let him be around my kid, end of story. And if this book hadn’t included the icky part with Michael’s daughter, it would have been a five-star read for me.

Here are more reviews I’ve written for this series:

Storm Front (The Dresden Files, #1) by Jim Butcher

Fool Moon (The Dresden Files #2) by Jim Butcher

Grave Peril (The Dresden Files, #3) by Jim Butcher

Summer Knight (The Dresden Files #4) by Jim Butcher

Death Masks (The Dresden Files, #5) by Jim Butcher

Blood Rites (The Dresden Files, #6) by Jim Butcher

Dead Beat (The Dresden Files #7) by Jim Butcher

And thanks for reading!