I was hoping the second book would be better than the first but I think I liked it less.The hardest thing for me to unpack is whether Dresden is just unlikable, and therefore I'm closed-minded in not respecting him as a character, or if there's something about him that's over a line.Butcher knows his character is in arse. Murphy even says, "You're such a pompous, arrogant, pretentious, chauvinistic, hopelessly old-fashioned, stupidly pigheaded..." So it isn't an unconscious move on Butcher's part, but I don't understand Dresden's motivations or reasons. Is he old-fashioned because he shorts out electronic stuff and is not up with the modern ways of the world? (Not that it would stop him from picking up a newspaper.) Why would his view of women not change, even though he deals with them on a semi-regular basis? Is his hard-headedness enough to explain that all away?What bothered me most, though, was that he sees Murphy as someone who needs to be protected, just because she's a woman. Forget that she's a kick ass detective, that she carries a gun, that she's probably seen and dealt with a whole bunch of crazy stuff Dresden doesn't even know about - if a baddie is nearby he goes into "MUST SAVE THE DAME" mode. Her gender trumps everything else. If Dresden treated Murphy as a true partner and they covered each others' backs that would be fine, but it's not even close to that.Other irks:- Our hero Dresden gets hurt quite badly early and gets even more hurt as the story goes on. Shoulder, leg, all over, and he still manages to claw out of deep holes and go over walls when he needs to.- At one point Dresden states that he has to save the world and that he may die because of that, and that's okay. Later he says hey, I nearly fixed everything and they're going to kill me, how rude. Pick one, dude.- There were times Dresden would tell us something via narration and then a different character would say the exact same thing a few lines later. Grah.- It seemed like women ended up (fully) naked a lot more than the guys.So yeah, I don't see myself revisiting this series.
