On the other hand, JB dawdled a bit too much with Aftermath & Ghost Story, and probably needed to get things moving again as we've crested the "hump" of the series.

Further back. I picked up Summer Knight again to brush up on details, and he was getting the headaches there too. I don't recall if he had them in the first three books (IIRC, there might have been something like that in Fool Moon), but that's been an ongoing thing for a while.

Maybe. It might have been for his protection, like the erasure of his fire magic and blasting rod were in Small Favor. Bob gave a lot of warnings about the potential dangers of Little Chicago burning out his brain if it wasn't just right, and I could see something like that going down if he tried to spy on Shagnasty.

Also, if that is related, than the Parasite becomes the number one suspect on the list of who might have repaired Little Chicago in Proven Guilty. In the end of that book, Harry and Bob are kind of stumped by the fact that something has been changed about the design, which in hindsight, fixed a problem that might have had serious backlash against Harry when he used it earlier in that book. They can't figure out who did it, because that person would have needed to know about the model, understood its workings intimately, and had sufficient knowledge and ability about Harry's defenses to beat them, get in, muck around with his magnum opus, and get out again, undetected. And the issue is never brought up again. Since Demonreach can make bargains with the Parasite, and it is sentient or self-aware to a degree sufficient to anticipate discovery and move to curtail Harry's being told about its nature, it stands to reason that it could have moved to prevent its own harm by Harry's ill-prepared device burning out his brain.

Actually, they seemed to be adults with jobs. Harry called them kids, but that's kind of a function of their relative inexperience and lack of power. He thought of the Alphas as kids up until Turn Coat, and Molly up through Ghost Story, and Billy & Molly both were in or near their mid-20s. I think the pressure they felt to choose had more to do with the call all the unaligned fae were experiencing as a result of the imminent war.

Maybe Mab was letting her bend the rules. Also, maybe she's strong enough to hold out. Fix & Lily have never been presented as beings of extraordinary strength of character - Harry kind of thought they were nice, but showed little respect for them beyond the power they had access to. Sarissa, on the other hand, has been personally groomed by Mab as a replacement for a long time.

Concur. See above though. Mab doesn't strike me as the sort who would balk at cheating when and where she could. I mean, the urge to Choose probably comes from somewhere, and if it is coming from her fae side, Mab would probably have the power to restrain that compulsion on a daughter of Winter. Once Sarissa committed to the fae, she'd probably be changed in ways that might make her unsuitable as the Winter Lady.

And Maeve's description of Sarissa's previous occupations or interests does seem to suggest, she's lived a few lifetimes playing at being a young woman.

Centuries, decades, who knows? Sarissa was probably a child Mab conceived by a mortal man. Maybe one of the Winter Knights she initiated. Or maybe she even dates as far back as when Mab was human as well, and simply held out against choosing like her mother and big sister eventually did.

Maybe Mab was once in Sarissa's position, only relative to Mother Winter.

I kind of like it. It seemed like they might have been on the verge of running out of things to do with Molly. I mean, she's been his apprentice for about six years or so. She was 14 when Maggie was conceived, and the kid's like nine or ten now. How long was she going to stay an apprentice, especially since the crush thing was brought up in Changes, and has not been allowed to die in the two successive volumes? Butcher's clearly invested a lot in making the character and her relationship with Harry important to the story, so this is a way they can maintain their relationship, keep learning stuff for the benefit of the readers, and at the same time, keep it fresh by putting a new dynamic on it.



Yeah, that's done. I think that was just a starting off point. You notice there were a lot of little things about the early books that have since been dropped, like the near-obligatory, once-per-book potion-making scene. While some of that was a case of Butcher figuring out what worked and what didn't (the Chekhov-esque nature of the potions was problematic, for example) I think a lot of the older aspects and fixtures in the series were there to make it more accessible.

The "PI with an office" situation was just a hook for getting him into stuff. Now, as the minion of Mab and the sole caretaker of a supernatural supermax, as well as a reinstated Warden of the White Council, adventure hooks are easy to come by. There is also, IMO, a need for supernatural stories set in the modern world to minimize the fantasy elements at first, and find familiar, relatable, real-world motivations and plot hooks that an audience will understand in their own right, without needing to immerse themselves in the mythology of the series. As the mythology builds and the character takes shape within his world, the reader no longer needs the hand-holding, so Harry doesn't need a mysterious or desperate and possibly nefarious client to walk in his business door and hand him a case. His motivations are sufficiently fleshed out, and the supernatural institutions to which he is beholden are established enough that the readers can grasp the import of how and why he can start running errands for villains and D-bags, like he has pretty consistently for several books now.

In the first half a dozen books, he was hired by clients, who increased in scope and power, from a housewife to a wealthy film producer, at the behest of a White Court vampire. At this point, when Thomas got him the job with Arturo, all the jobs now came from people he had dealt with before, and as an exchange of favors or based on past history with the character, rather than for a fee. Oh, stuff like that came up sometimes, but it was no longer the motivation. The clients were now Mavra extorting him with dirt on Murphy, the Gatekeeper and Merlin pushing him to flip the situation of his early days and be the paranoid Warden, Murphy asking him to help solve a murder that she can't pay him for, Mab calling in a marker to make him save an old enemy, and Morgan asking him for shelter. From normal, or normal-seeming, clients, to people that the Harry Dresden of books 1-4 would have never believed he'd help in a million years, people with whom he had an adversarial relationship or worse in those early days. The significance of that clientele was previously established, and I don't think he's been employed or asked to help by anyone new to the series since the monks who hired him to rescue Mouse's litter. And that was just a story that the book opened in media res with, not a proper case. Even in the two prior cases, he had a referral from a previously established character (Fr. Vincent from Forthill, and Mab from Lea, figuratively speaking).

The point I'm getting at, is that for a long time, Harry's been moving away from people who've read his Yellow Pages ad, and his adventures have been increasingly based on the situation and conditions of the supernatural world, and the stakes have had to do with his established place in the setting, rather than the universally understood motivation of an employer and financial remuneration.

When the Red Court blew up his office building, I think that was the first time the story was set there in a full novel since Mab's visit back in book 4, or maybe something pertaining to the Shroud case, before they discovered Fr Vincent was a Denarian.