"Storm Front" by Jim Butcher

 The first book of the 'Dresden Files' series starring Chicago magician Harry Dresden. 

Harry Potter meets Philip Marlowe. Wizard Harry, a consultant with the Chicago Police Department and a private investigator, is recruited both to advise on a particularly horrific double homicide and to find a missing husband. Inevitably the cases are linked. Battles with demons, gangsters and other wizards result as he races against deadlines imposed both by the police, who soon suspect he is the murderer, and the White Council who believe him guilty of breaking the Laws of Magic.

I understand this genre is fantasy, because magic is involved, but low fantasy in that there are clear rules governing the use of magic, and urban fantasy because of its setting. I find the use of magic reduces some of the tension (because there are fewer limitations on what can be done) and the empathy (because I don't have magical powers) so I find these sort of stories less interesting than other forms of speculative fiction such as scifi. Nevertheless, Harry is a classic wise-cracking hard-bitten detective, adding humour to the tension, and the battle scenes are described with relish. The scene in which a naked Harry was tottering inside a protective shield with a clothed woman who had mistakenly taken a love potion and was trying to make love to him while a demon made ready to kill them both was brilliant.

It's well written with some interesting characters (though only the protagonist can be said to have any degree of complexity) and carefully plotted with twists and turns all the way to the end. I read it in two days, turning the pages fast.

Selected quotes:

• "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face." (Ch 1)
• "Smiling always seems to annoy people more than actually insulting them." (Ch 3)
• "A pure heart and mind only takes you so far - sooner or later the hormones have their say, too." (Ch 5)
• "His fist went across my jaw at approximately a million miles per hour, and I spun down to the dirt like a string-cut puppet." (Ch 7)
• "What you know about women, I could juggle." (Ch 8)
• "I had to maintain a fine balance between going in ready for trouble and going in looking for trouble." (Ch 9)
• "They had the look of lifestyle professionals, the kind that have a career and no kids, with enough money and time to spend on making themselves look good." (Ch 10)
• "I just flew apart into a cloud of a million billion tiny pieces of Harry, each one with its own perspective and view." (Ch 14) This reminded me of the way Klara sees things in a very different book: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.
• "Mr Hendricks, beside him, was glaring at me, his single eyebrow lowered far enough to threaten him with blinding." (Ch 17)

January 2022; 307 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God