ranuel | Fool Moon Review (Reply)

Fool Moon by Jim Butcher
Dresden Files Book 2

One of the first things you have to do when you decide to write a werewolf or vampire story is decide what sort of werewolves or vampires you're going to use. With vampires you can pick anywhere along the spectrum from Nosferatu to Sparklepire thanks to generations of novelists putting their own spin on the myth. Werewolves haven't gotten as much diversity in pop culture but in the original myths there were always more than one kind of werewolf and occasionally writers remember that.

Butcher sidesteps the whole issue by choosing to use them all. Or at least as many as would fit in one novel. Dresden has to solve the mystery of who is behind a series of gruesome murders committed around the time of the full moon each month and as he investigates he encounters five different kinds of wolf/human shifters each with their own agenda. Meanwhile he's got to deal with the crime lord from the first novel trying to put him on his payroll and the fall out from Murphy and her superiors suspecting he already is.

I liked this one better than the first novel even though I was reading it on my lunch break and always seemed to hit a cliff hanger right when I had to go back to work. I liked the new characters, the progression of things in Dresden's life, and the action scenes work really well. The plot advances a bit unevenly though and there are dangling threads that I hope will be picked up in future novels.

I continued to be disappointed by the lack of Bob compared to the TV version even though this Bob isn't that Bob.

Dresden gets a love interest in this one and I'm not sure that his relationship with Susan, a tabloid journalist, is a good thing for either one of them but it's bound to give us some interesting plot.