The Dresden Files

The Dresden Files is a series of urban fantasy novels by the American author Jim Butcher, following Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard and the only entry under "Wizards" in the city's phone book. The first novel, Storm Front, was published in April 2000. The eighteenth, Twelve Months, arrived in January 2026, and Butcher has confirmed that a nineteenth novel, Mirror Mirror, will follow before the series moves into its long-promised closing trilogy.

The series's particular trick is the blend at its heart. Each novel is structured as a hard-boiled detective story, with Harry as the wizard private eye narrating the case in tight first person, but the genre conventions of urban fantasy are layered on top; vampires, fae courts, fallen angels, ghosts, and pantheons of older gods. The mix worked from the first book and has improved as the series has gone on, particularly as Butcher has gradually shifted the scale of the threats Harry faces. The early novels are largely self-contained cases with a slow background hum of larger problems; the later books are increasingly serialised, with the consequences of one book directly reshaping the world the next book takes place in. By the time you reach Changes at book twelve, the series has shifted decisively into long-form storytelling, and from that point on the books are best read in close order.

For new readers, the place to start is Storm Front, with the strong caveat that the series finds its full stride a few books in. Grave Peril (book three) is often pointed to as the moment the series settles into itself, and Summer Knight (book four) and Death Masks (book five) are where many long-term fans say they were locked in for good. Changes is the pivot; Skin Game is one of the cleanest entries Butcher has produced; and Peace Talks, Battle Ground and Twelve Months form the most recent emotional arc.

Outside the main novels, the world of Harry Dresden has accumulated a surprisingly substantial amount of additional material. There are two short story collections (Side Jobs and Brief Cases), several novellas (most notably The Law, set after Battle Ground), occasional appearances in anthologies, and The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game, published by Evil Hat in 2010, which is among the more readable RPG sourcebooks ever produced; partly because Butcher's own characters argue with the game text in the margins. There was also a television adaptation in 2007, The Dresden Files, made by the Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy), with Paul Blackthorne in the lead role. It ran for a single season of twelve episodes before being cancelled, and is, charitably, of historical interest. The audiobook editions of the novels, almost all of them narrated by James Marsters (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, where he played Spike), are by contrast genuinely excellent, and many readers have come to consider Marsters's Harry as the canonical voice of the character.

The series is, in our view, one of the most consistent and warmly populated long-running urban fantasies of the past quarter-century. It is also one of the easiest reading you will find anywhere; Butcher's first-person prose is direct, propulsive and frequently funny, and even the more cosmic later books rarely lose the sense that you are spending time inside Harry Dresden's head. If you have not read any of it before, Storm Front is waiting.