Linda @ (un)Conventional Bookworms

Skin Game - Jim Butcher
Series: The Dresden Files #15
Published by: Roc, on 27 May 2014
Genres: Adult, Urban Fantasy
Pages: 454, Format: eBook
Source: Kindle Purchase

Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, is about to have a very bad day….

Because as Winter Knight to the Queen of Air and Darkness, Harry never knows what the scheming Mab might want him to do. Usually, it’s something awful.

He doesn’t know the half of it….

Mab has just traded Harry’s skills to pay off one of her debts. And now he must help a group of supernatural villains—led by one of Harry’s most dreaded and despised enemies, Nicodemus Archleone—to break into the highest-security vault in town so that they can then access the highest-security vault in the Nevernever.

It’s a smash-and-grab job to recover the literal Holy Grail from the vaults of the greatest treasure hoard in the supernatural world—which belongs to the one and only Hades, Lord of the freaking Underworld and generally unpleasant character. Worse, Dresden suspects that there is another game afoot that no one is talking about. And he’s dead certain that Nicodemus has no intention of allowing any of his crew to survive the experience. Especially Harry.

Dresden’s always been tricky, but he’s going to have to up his backstabbing game to survive this mess—assuming his own allies don’t end up killing him before his enemies get the chance….

Skin Game is an amazing installment in the Dresden Files series! Harry has several epiphanies thanks to his friends, and there are lots of bad guys to fight, while protecting the innocent.

My Skin Game review:

Jim Butcher has outdone himself with Skin Game! To read the 15th book in a series and think ‘yes, this one is my favorite!’ is nothing short of amazing. Harry has come a long, long way, and the fact that he’s been all alone on the strange island in Lake Michigan with Demonreach has made him feel a little out of touch both with himself and with his friends. Who can he trust? Who should he stay away from? And how come his head hurts so much? When Mab shows up to get him back to Chicago for a job she has for him – he’s both happy and not at the same time. If she can help him keep the headaches at bay, and he can see some of his friends and allies, that’s a win-win situation for him.

As Skin Game unfolds, old enemies, new allies and very good friends are present to either help or hinder Harry. And this new adventure takes him on a trip far, far into the never-never, to a place he had never planned on visiting. With a full cast of characters, and the underlying feeling of unease and untrust, there wasn’t a single dull word during the whole book. Harry’s inner battle was also stronger than ever, and there were some very sweet moments when he was able to spend some time with old friends whom he had thought he would not be able to see anymore, as well as with a very special person he never dreamed would accept him.

Even the villains are well developed by Butcher, and some of them were not exactly new to me. The way Harry deals with them, all while pretending all is good in the world clearly is so very Harry, and his sarcasm and stupid puns never fail to make me laugh out loud. Skin Game has it all, action, a little romance, mythology, fights, some of my favorite characters from this series, and so much going on! The main story is a quest of sorts, and I loved how that was done, however, the sub-plots were amazing as well.

If you aren’t familiar with the Dresden Files yet, you should definitely get your hands on it! It’s refreshing to have a male main character, and he’s just a normal guy who happens to be a wizard. I enjoy that he isn’t too young, even if he’s not old yet either. His self-depreciation, while he at the same time thinks he’s important in order to save Chicago is just one of the many contradictions that make me love him so much.

Some of my favorite Skin Game quotes:

It makes you scared. It makes you think that maybe you’ve made some horrible mistakes lately. It drives you to do something, to act – only when you’re stuck on an island in the middle of Lake Michigan, you’re kind of limited in your choices of exactly what you can do to blow off steam.

She expected me to be upset. Definitely, she wanted something. In my experience, when the Queen of Air and Darkness decides she wants something from you, it’s a good time to crawl in a hole and pull it in after you.

She was pale, beautiful on a scale that beggared simple description, and I harbored a healthy and rational terror of her.

It went like that for a subjective century and a half, and maybe thirty objective seconds.