Review: Brief Cases

Brief Cases by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Harry Dresden has a highly distinctive voice, and the challenge for the author in many of these stories - those which are told from a non-Dresden character POV - is to have them sound like themselves, and not like Dresden. He does a good, though not quite perfect, job of it.

He also tells some terrific side-stories in the Dresden universe. I'd read a number of them before in other collections, but they rewarded rereading.

The last story, which only appears in this volume, is a particularly good one. Harry takes his daughter Maggie and their dog Mouse to the zoo, and each of the three gets a turn to narrate an adventure in which they deal with threats that only they can deal with (or, in some cases, perceive). And all three of the adventures are going on at the same time, so we get overlap where each of the three tells us about the same events from a different point of view. It's well done and enjoyable, and shows us that the next generation of Dresden hasn't fallen far from the tree at all.

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