And there’s a lot of good werewolf stuff here. This was a relationship that completely broke my immersion from what was otherwise a really interesting novel about magic and werewolves. Doesn’t get annoyed at her, doesn’t get rightfully pissed, he feels guilty for having to keep secrets from her secrets that, if he shares with a non-wizardy person, he’ll be commiting a crime punishable by death! She arrests him, refuses to trust him and he nods along with it, feeling bad for himself and for her. How does Dresden accept her accussations and behaviour? He feels bad. Murphy acts as judge, jury and executioner without anything but circumstantial evidence and facts unrelated to one another. She goes as far as to arrest Harry Dresden, refusing to trust him even a long, long time after a menagerie of events proves his innocence beyond reasonable doubt. She doesn’t act like a competent cop, investigating ritualistic murders that seem to have been committed by some sort of a beast, instead choosing to jump to one wrong conclusion after another without any solid evidence. In Fool Moon, Murphy is impossible to stomach. She wasn’t memorable enough next to Harry, his talking skull and dangerous businessman and mafioso John Marcone.

Cool, the competent detective prototype that’s common enough in this urban fantasy subgenre we so adore. The way she was written in the first one didn’t make much of an impression. So there I was, excited to know more I quickly got Fool Moon, I started it and somewhere half-way along the book, I pressed pause and did not touch it for nearly two years. To top it all off? I have it on good authority that James Masters, over the sixteen or so books in the series, makes the character and series his own with a remarkable audio performance. Here was the humble beginning of a likable protagonist, the lead of a first-person novel that defines more than any other work of fiction the look of today’s urban fantasy. I listened to James Masters’s reading of the first Harry Dresden novel almost two years ago - my Goodreads shelf tells me I read it on Jand I enjoyed it deeply. Hullo and welcome to this tiny review, in which I will bitch and moan about Fool Moon for a wee bit! Why? Because #EverythingIsContent !

Harry dresden fool moon