proven guilty: book eight of the dresden files

The second to last one I can get my hands on without having to buy one!

This installment brings us Harry helping out a grown-up and gothed-out runaway daughter of a old friend and her drugged-out boyfriend. In no time flat, he's involved in a Horror Convention whose name includes three exclamation points and is being plagued by grisly horror-movie themed murders. This leads Harry to the trail of a warlock, through the very heart of the Winter Court of Faerie, against the oldest creatures to feed on fear and to something entirely different then he expected to wind up at. Meanwhile, Red Court vamps are attacking the Council and Wardens even when they should be under Faerie protection, and neither Summer or Winter will move to help because it'll divide forces and make one side weaker then the other, which they only just avoided in Summer Knight a few years before. Added to that, Harry's falling for Murphy, and the two of them have some sweet moments and long talks that crush my shippy little soul but make perfect sense within the characters, Thomas is acting weird and being distant, we get to hang out with Rawlins-the-cop, Mab might be nuts or it might be another plot, the Summer Lady and Summer Knight are under a compulsion not to help Harry with anything, Harry's building a new metaphysical toy in the basement, and the scare-mongers are getting loose. And there's another shadowy organization taking the field. Harry goes up against the Council and manages to piss off the Merlin, but wins more support amongst the rest. Molly is more than she seems.

I fear I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but these books really do keep upping the ante each time. He's cranking them out at a rate of one a year, slowed only by the start of another series between books so that he's still making one book a year, and yet there's no evidence of fatigue. Storylines make perfect sense. Nothing falls through the cracks. And really, who other than Harry could attack the center of all Winter's power and survive? Who could have a fallen angel embedded in his brain and not give in to temptation? The plot's thickening all over the place, and yet it manages to still make sense, building on previous plot twists, bringing back already-established characters rather then introducing new ones to do what they do so that there's a sort of continuity to the world, a sense of community. And the relationships between the characters keep growing the way real ones do.

And the whole book was worth it for Harry freaking out over some kids dressed up as vampires, before he realizes they aren't real.