Women are dying in Chicago. They are ruled as suicides, but Murphy suspects differently and brings in Dresden to have a look. When he finds a Bible verse written in such a way that only a wizard can find it, there's no doubt that the "suicides" are actually murders. As Harry digs deeper, his discoveries don't make the job any easier. An old enemy rears its head, the war between the White Council and the vampires hangs in the balance, and his half-brother becomes a suspect. He must unravel the mystery to protect those he cares about without tipping off an unknown informant in the Council or getting himself killed while also still keeping the fallen angel Lasciel at bay. It's just another day for Dresden....
Impression: I love the Dresden Files series and look forward to picking up the next book when it comes out, but White Night was a bit disappointing for me. It was still a fun read, I still enjoyed it and devoured it like the other books in the series, but it falls among my least favorite among the Dresden books. The writing felt off--less concise and polished than in previous books, and there were issues in the way the story was written that didn't sit well with me.
The plot was pretty simple, which has worked in previous books, but didn’t work so well in this one because I was able to figure out the bad guys before the main character did. Since I'm not the brightest with figuring these kinds of things out, the transparency bothered me; the fact that I had it figured out before Dresden bothered me even more. And there were, not so much holes in the plotting, but little bumps that puzzled me. For example, there's a point in the book where Dresden opens a doorway into the Nevernever and he herds a group of people through but never makes it through himself. It's never really clearly explained how these people got out of the Nevernever. As a reader of the series, I can pretty much figured out who helped out, but a new reader doesn't have that benefit of experience. Considering the amount of words that were extraneous in the novel, some of those words could have been cut to allow for a clear explanation of how people got out. (However, I will admit that it could have been slipped in and I missed it since I was reading quite late.)
On the upside, Dresden is as wonderful as ever and, even with the bloated feeling of the writing, the story does still pull you along. There's always a concern this far into a series (especially after the Anita Blake books) that the character changes will make the character unrecognizable, or the plotting will fall apart, and neither of those happen here. Dresden is recognizably Dresden, and the plot works despite the bumps. And I do love the interaction between Dresden and Lasciel--I was worried when she first showed up in his life, but now I'm sad to see her go (assuming she's really gone). And it's going to be interesting to see how the end events affect the Dresden world. So I'm not totally turned off by the book, just not nearly as impressed as I have been with previous books. I can still recommend it, just not for a first time Dresden Files reader--there's too much that requires someone who is familiar with the world setting.
