I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this long-running series – read my review of Turn Coat here and my review of Ghost Story here. So with the fifteenth book in the series, can Jim Butcher continue to sustain the freshness and vitality that is a hallmark of Harry Dresden and his adventures?
Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, is about to have a very bad day. As Winter Knight to the Queen of Air and Darkness, Harry never knows what the scheming Mab might want him to do. Usually, it’s something awful. This time, it’s worse than that. Mab’s involved Harry in a smash-and-grab heist run by one of his most despised enemies, to recover a special object from the vaults of the greatest treasure horde in the world – which belongs to the one and only Hades, Lord of the Underworld. Dresden’s always been tricky, but he’s going to have to up his backstabbing game to survive this mess – assuming his own allies don’t end up killing him before his enemies get the chance . . .
So that’s the blurb. The whole book revolves around this particular job that Queen Mab has hauled him into. Harry is only too well aware of just how much he is hated by the person organising this job – but he doesn’t have a choice. As Queen Mab’s Winter Knight, he is forced to represent her.
In order for this book to work, we have to really care about Harry’s plight and get completely caught up in every plot progression. And I did. Absolutely. As far as I’m concerned, this slice of Harry Dresden’s adventures is one of the best in a while. The storyline drew me in from the beginning so that I didn’t want to put it down until the last page – and when I finished, I was sad that a really enjoyable, engrossing time had come to an end. Having said that – I’ve recently been ploughing through a couple of books that were as much fun as jabbing myself in the eye with a sharp pencil, so it was a joy to return to a well-crafted, tale full of unpredictable twists all happening to a character I really cared about.
If you haven’t read any of this long, eventful series, then you could do a lot better than jumping into the middle of Harry’s world by starting off with this book. Which isn’t advice I generally hand out to someone coming across a mid-series book, but in this case I really think it works. Yes – there is a great deal of backstory, but because of the particular structure of Skin Game which is centred around the task Harry has been set, the lack of familiarity with the rest of the canon isn’t much of a disadvantage. What it does, is give you a fantastic introduction to Harry and many of his closest friends and enemies. And once you’ve got to the end of the book, I’ll be very surprised if you don’t rush to grab hold of Storm Front, the first book in this great series.
9/10
Brainfluff 