Skin Game

A small note before the review: Skin Game is the kind of book that hides a lot of its best work in its second half, and to talk about it usefully I will need to touch on a few of the setup beats from the opening chapters. I have tried to keep specific plot resolutions and the bigger character developments out, but you should consider yourself lightly warned. If you would rather come to the book entirely cold, bookmark this and come back when you have read it.

Skin Game is the fifteenth novel in the Dresden Files and one of the books I would point to if anyone ever asked me to defend Butcher as a working novelist. It came out on the 27th of May 2014, simultaneously in the US and the UK, after a string of cosmically larger books (Changes, Ghost Story, Cold Days) that had taken Harry Dresden through death, resurrection, and the transformation of his entire status quo. By the time of Skin Game, Harry is properly the Winter Knight to Mab the Queen of Air and Darkness, with all the moral compromises and uncomfortable obligations that the role entails, and the question hanging over the book is essentially this: now that Harry is no longer the Chicago PI of Storm Front and now that the wider universe of the Dresden Files has cracked open into something vast and apocalyptic, can Butcher still write a proper Harry Dresden adventure of the old kind? The answer is yes. Loudly and with style.

The premise sits in the part of the publisher blurb you can read on the back cover, so I am not telling you anything you would not learn in the first twenty pages. Mab, in payment of a debt of her own, has loaned Harry's services to Nicodemus Archleone, the leader of the Order of the Blackened Denarius and quite possibly the single most thoroughly evil antagonist in the series to date. Nicodemus is putting together a heist. The target is the personal vault of Hades, Lord of the Underworld, accessed via a vault in our own world that is itself one of the most heavily guarded places in Chicago. The crew Nicodemus has assembled to crack this thing open includes Harry, the Denarians themselves, and a small handful of professional specialists whose competencies fit the various technical, magical and theological problems a job of this kind requires. Among the named items in the vault is the Holy Grail. Harry, predictably, is not at all happy about any of this. Mab does not particularly care.

What Butcher does with this setup is, in my view, his best heist-novel writing in the series. The Dresden Files have always been good at borrowing the structures of other genres (the noir mystery, the police procedural, the war novel, the courtroom thriller) and putting an urban-fantasy spin on them, but Skin Game is the book that does it most cleanly and most enjoyably. The pleasures of the genre are all present and correct; the assembling of the crew, the planning, the dry runs, the unforeseen complications, the rapidly shifting alliances, the careful negotiation of who is going to betray whom and when. Butcher writes all of it with the obvious joy of a man who has clearly read a great many heist stories and now gets to write one of his own with the additional licence of being able to throw fallen angels and Greek gods into the mix.

What makes the book sing, though, is not the heist plot in isolation but the way it brings several of the series' most missed characters back into focus. Michael Carpenter, the former Knight of the Cross who stepped down from the role in Small Favor, returns to the storyline in a meaningful way. Karrin Murphy is on excellent form. Butters, the medical examiner who has been quietly growing into one of the series' most interesting supporting players since Dead Beat, gets his most consequential book to date, and I will say nothing more specific than that. The contrast between Harry's working alliance with the Denarians and his deepening relationships with the people on the side of the angels (sometimes very literally) is the spine of the novel's moral argument, and the book is far smarter about that argument than the rapid pace of the writing might lead you to expect.

There are caveats, fairly mild ones. The middle stretch of the heist preparation does what middle stretches of heist novels always do, which is to spend a certain amount of pages moving pieces around in ways that pay off later but that, taken in isolation, are not always thrilling in their own right. Some of the new specialists Butcher introduces feel like they exist primarily to serve the plot rather than as people you would want to spend time with in their own right, and they do not get the same room to breathe that the returning regulars get. The book also leans, in one or two places, on what I would call the action-movie comma; the kind of breathless run-on sentence that Butcher uses to keep the energy up but which, in the wrong mood, can read as a touch dialled to eleven. None of this is going to ruin the book for anyone, but they are honest reservations.

Skin Game earned a Hugo nomination for Best Novel in 2015, and the recognition was fair. As a piece of writing, it is the closest the Dresden Files came in the 2010s to recapturing the energy of the early novels while still working comfortably with the larger, weirder, more cosmic world the series had grown into. It is also, in hindsight, an important book in the wider Dresden timeline. It does work that Peace Talks and Battle Ground later depend on, particularly in the development of certain supporting characters and certain magical artefacts, and reading it now with the benefit of knowing what comes next, you can see Butcher quietly assembling the pieces for the storm that is coming. The novel does not announce itself as a turning point in the way that Changes or Battle Ground do, but it is one in retrospect, and it is probably the smoothest, most enjoyable turning point of the lot.

If you are new to the series, this is not where you start; you would lose a great deal of the emotional weight of the heist crew without knowing who half of them are, and the entire payoff of Harry's discomfort with his Mab-imposed obligations depends on having read Changes and Cold Days. But if you have made it to book fifteen, you are in for one of the best entries in the series. Skin Game is Jim Butcher operating at the top of his game, and given how good the top of his game is, that is no small thing.