This book took me months to read. I started it in mid-March. It is now, if you haven’t looked at a calendar recently, late July. And it’s not as if this was a bad book. It did start slow, but it picked up quickly. But there was just something off about it that I couldn’t put my finger on until the very end.

The entire concept of The Dresden Files is a fascinating one. A wizard who solves crimes? Sign me up. It should be excellent, right? I like crime novels. I love wizards. Put them together, and you get an amazing combo. Or at least, you should. And again, it’s not as if this book is bad. So let’s get into it. This is my review of Fool Moon by Jim Butcher, the second novel in The Dresden Files.

❗️ Warning: Spoilers Ahead

Plot⌗

People are dying. And the culprit is apparently a werewolf. Murphy, the cop that sometimes hires Harry Dresden to consult, calls Harry in even though she’s not supposed to be on the case. Their relationship is very tense, as Harry lied to her in book 1, so she is having a hard time trusting her pet wizard. The FBI is officially in charge of the case, and they’re very FBI-y about the whole thing, if that makes sense.

At the beginning of the book, all we know is that someone is taking out members of a large crime family and that it appears to be something supernatural doing it. Something with big claws. Murphy wants Dresden to figure out what’s going on. So, Harry does the only real magic we see in the entire book, finds out who is behind some of the killings, and then someone is killed at the house of the werewolf responsible for one of the killings.

That person? Someone that Harry met at the beginning of the book. And of course, Murphy finds out and then arrests Harry. She doesn’t listen to him, and he did nothing wrong, but Murphy doesn’t seem to care.

If you can tell, I have turned a bit sour on Murphy’s character.

Then the book carries on for 300 pages with Harry bumbling from one fiasco to the next trying to figure out who actually committed the murders, because the big bad wolf that he found first wasn’t responsible for all of them. There’s a conspiracy afoot.

The rest of the plot is so convoluted and tangled up that it’s difficult to summarize. Between wolf-like street gangs, a big crime boss who wants to enslave Harry legally, a non-human shape-shifter with apparent ulterior motives, a bit of gratuitous sex with a throwaway female character, and a bunch of wannabe-werewolf-crime-fighters, this book is a mess.

Needless to say, Harry succeeds at the end. How does he do it? Well, by becoming a wolf like the guys he’s fighting, of course.

A Sad Excuse for a Wizard⌗

I like the character Harry Dresden. But as a wizard, he’s pretty inept. Or at least this book made him seem so. In the first book, Harry was doing magic almost constantly. He seemed magical. In this one, he runs out of magic about two-thirds of the way through, and then he’s just a guy with a gun with no real talent or will to use it. Every corner he’s put in, he’s saved by someone else. There’s only one exception, when he fights the biggest wolf at the police department. There, he’s actually a badass. It’s the only time in this book that made me like him as a wizard.

Harry is constantly in danger after that moment. The pace of the book was good, and the danger he was in felt real and not contrived. I enjoyed his enemies and figuring out who the real bad guys were, though it was pretty obvious if you’ve read these types of books in the past. The bad guys always show up in the first chapter.

I hate that Harry has to constantly rely on others to get himself out of trouble. I don’t want an infallible hero, but I don’t like one that is constantly saying he’s a badass and then not actually proving it.

The Downfall of Detective Murphy⌗

But honestly, Harry’s ineptitude isn’t my biggest issue with this book. It’s Murphy. She’s a cop, and all cops are suspicious and paranoid. I get that; I really do. But her stubborn distrust of Harry, who has only ever helped her out, costs people their lives in this one. She’s the reason this book even goes past page 200. She arrests Harry on trumped-up charges, refuses to listen to him, and then is a horrible person for the rest of the book. Even when Harry saves her life not once, but twice, she still thinks he’s the bad guy. Right up until the very last pages, she’s still talking about him as if he was the one who orchestrated the entire thing.

This just pisses me off. Murphy is supposed to be this smart, savvy cop who knows more than the rest of her department because she sees the supernatural every single day. It’s okay to be mad at Harry for keeping things from her in the first book, even okay to be distrustful of him due to that. What’s not okay is being stupid. And she’s dumb as a box of rocks in this book. She alienates the one person who’s actually on her side, and not only that, she continues to do that even after him saving her life twice.

She finally comes around in the last few pages, but what took so long? I don’t get it. I wanted Murphy to be awesome. Maybe that’s on me for putting her character on a bit of a pedestal, but she was definitely the low point of this book.

A Good Ending⌗

I did enjoy the ending, even if the way Harry goes about fighting feels like bad writing at first. I hated that he became a wolf to stop some of the bad guys. But by the end of the fight, it was actually excellent. The whole “live long enough to see yourself become the villain” thing was well done even if the writing was a bit too poetic for my tastes. I liked the final showdown where Butcher played on the fact that Murphy had been so distrustful of Harry for the whole book to make us all think she was about to shoot Dresden for no reason. I really hated her then. She was going to die because she was so stubborn. But she was really aiming for the guy behind Harry. I love misdirection like that, and it kind of made up for how stupid Murphy seemed throughout the rest of the book. Kind of.

Overall , this was a good book. I know I had many negative things to say, but I did enjoy it. I wish that Harry was more of a badass sometimes, and I wish Murphy knew who was on her side, but overall, this was good. I’ll definitely keep reading the series.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ Stars - Amazon Link