This is a spoiler thread, I will spoiler things for these 18 month old books, as I’m probably the last interested person to read these, I don’t anticipate this being a problem but you have been warned.
Also this is a less a review than a lot whinging broken down into discrete chunks, for this also you have been warned.
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
Two Part Book
I got both parts of these for Christmas knowing they were a two part book. That may have been a mistake. Either book on it’s own isn’t great, one is all talk, the other all action. Both are kind of padded to make it full books, especially the corner hounds and lightsaber scene in PT. But reading them back to back leads to a lot of repetition due to the conceit that it’s two complete books. The repeated fights/arguments with McCoy and Ramirez.
It either needed to be one book, or two books that much more divorced from each other imo. Peace Talks falls very much into ‘they wasted a perfectly good plot’ Harry actually talking part in Peace Talks having to learn to even more than he did in Turn Coat to play the game and he can’t smash through things and just general do a new an interesting thing with the book. Instead Thomas fucks things up in the first chapter and the talks are dead in the water from the get go.
Battle Ground is all fights and Butcher writes a good fight but so many of them with such little context? Surround? It lacks impact and I just didn’t care by the last few. In theory things like the Black Court fight should have been a massive deal but when they’re an act 1 side quest? Not so much.
Big Bad
Ethniu. Last Titan. Able to take every other heavy hitter in the series and come out on top, if a little worn down. Why the heck had we not heard of her before? Did I miss something? I find the formor being held down by the Red Court plausible? But a Titan? Where the Red King/Lords of outer night supposed to be restraining her somehow?
If she’s that powerful why wait until then? Peace Talks makes reference to the fact that she can’t be as strong as she seems because she’s pulling a divide and conquer on the Accord nations but Battle Ground doesn’t follow up on it. Battle Ground points out the massive plothole that she could easily break the masquerade with hit and run tactics but offers no better reason than she’s a stupid big bad overlord type for why she doesn’t.
McCoy
I’ve like McCoy less and less ever since Changes. I liked that he was a bit of a broken pedestal for Dresden as the Blackstaff but he’s gone from a principled person who took Harry in and taught him morals to his grandfather who only took him because of that family connection, never helped it out before, then refuses to help in Changes until he realises it’s his neck on the line with the death curse. (unless I’m misremembering)
These books he’s nothing but an argumentative dick trying to control Harry to save him and suddenly has a massive hate-on for the White Court he didn’t before. He threatened Lara when she attacked Harry but otherwise was quite calm and ration about the alliance with them in Turn Coat.
Ramirez, the Wardens and the White Council
I’ve a lot of sympathy For Ramirez as a character. He got messed up and then messed up hard again by Molly in Cold Case (accidentally) so he’s bound to be angsty about the Winter Court.
I’ve got no sympathy to the Wardens or White Council for chucking him out. They and the fans act like it was Harry’s own fault and in part it is. But they didn’t off their olive branch or come to him with their worries until the very last second and then when circumstances dictate Harry can’t do anything at that moment act like it’s fault they’re chucking him out.
If you ambush him in the middle of the road, make it clear you think he’s mind whammied by Lara, he’s got no reason to believe you’ll trust him if he denies it. (Though everyone seems to have forgotten the whole swear on his power being the ultimate ‘trust me’ move in the ‘verse in early books)
Still it’s clear from the start of Peace Talks he’s getting chucked out of the Council since he can’t make any moves to stop it because of the peace talks. I guess we might have been expecting a dues ex where he’s let off for saving the world but really it was a forgone conclusion.
Butters
This was the book when Butcher’s favouritism for Butters really started to become too obvious and detrimental to the book for me.
Sure he got a lot of upgrades and powers and moments telling off Harry in Cold Days and Skin Game. He got a hot girlfriend, fine. He got a lightsaber and became a night of the cross, kind of wanky and silly and overt a shoutout but okay it was a cool conclusion for the book. And ‘Day One’ was a great little story about him that didn’t make him perfect.
But peace talks/battle ground was shilling and wank about him from start to finish. He gets another hot girlfriend for threesomes. He gets a whole scene dedicated to going to massive detail about him and the workings of his new lightsaber. He gets dresden fawning over how awesome he is as he wades effortlessly and amazingly through a battlefield leading a charge.
He tanks Ethniu’s attack with nothing but the power of faith. Sure he does then get curbstomped by her but so did McCoy, Listen To Winds, River Shoulders, and mutliple fae queens. He doesn’t come out looking bad.
Murphy
That death sucked, not only did I not want Murphy to go, it was an anti-climatic death at that, arguably that’s the point but since I heard Butcher got divorced between Skin Game and Peace Talks I’m really suspicious there’s some reality subtext to the long standing female love interest getting a bridge dropped on them.
Plus her being picked as an Einherjar despite being a devoted and faithful Catholic who probably wanted to go to a Christian afterlife and not fight forever really strikes a wrong note to me. Then again maybe this means we will see her again? She’s not supposed to return until everyone’s forgotten her but since the series is supposed to end with the apocalypse of all apocalypses, may that rule will be waived, or he’ll see her in some spirit world or something.
Revelations
Now I’d spoiled myself extensively on Tvtropes but even so the revelations at the end seemed kind of t acked on and lackluster. I’m kind of glad I did spoil myself on Marcone because I’d forgotten there was even a thing about a missing denarian coin.
Justine’s thing felt tacked on as well and Thomas went undealt with by the end. It should be a big deal but it… kind of isn’t?
(lack of) Status Quo
One of the comments I saw as I just started Battle Ground was the status quo by the end of the book was awesome and I just though… The Dresden Files has had no status quo since Changes, every book since then at least to me has started Harry off in wildly different circumstances (a spirit/Mab’s lair/demonreach/family life) and a lot of them seem to be dealing the crisis of the book and catching up with the wildly different circumstances of the side characters each time.
There’s no status quo the same as Harry is a PI/Wizard taking cases/crises as they come.
So cool Dresden has his old basement and a castle now. I actually dig the sequel hook for Twelve Months with a Harry/Lara/Molly/Dead Murphy’s memory love quadrangle, but it’s not what I call a Status Quo you know?