Book Review: Blood Rites by Jim Butcher

 

Goodreads Summary: Lost Items Found. Paranormal Investigations. Consulting. Advice. Reasonable Rates. No Love Potions, Endless Purses, or Other Entertainment.
For Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard, there have been worse assignments than going undercover on the set of an adult film. Dodging flaming monkey-poo, for instance. Or going toe-to-leaf with a walking plant monster. Still, there's something more troubling than usual about his newest case. The film's producer believes he's the target of a sinister entropy curse-but it's the women around him who are dying in increasingly spectacular ways.

Harry's even more frustrated because he only got involved with this bizarre mystery as a favor to Thomas, his flirtatious, self-absorbed vampire acquaintance of dubious integrity. Thomas has a personal stake in the case Harry can't quite figure out until his investigation leads him straight to Thomas's oversexed vampire family. Harry is about to discover that Thomas's family tree has been hiding a shocking secret: a revelation that will change Harry's life forever.

Goodreads Rating: 4.29 stars with over 118,000 ratings

Genre Listing: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Fiction, Paranormal, Magic, Vampires, Wizards, Supernatural

Goodreads Challenge: 11/50

2021 Reading Challenge: #11 Read a book with exactly two words in the title (Find the complete challenge here) 

Other reviews on the series: Death Masks, Fool Moon, Grave Peril, Storm Front, Summer Knight

Book Review:

Happy weekend, Readers! I am delighted that it is finally Friday. I'm currently spending it doing an Amazon Watch Party with Tress as she introduces me to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I never really hopped on the hype because it started airing when I was around 10 or 11. So far, I'm really enjoying it. We're nearly done with season one.

Anyways, on to a whole different universe of Vampires, the ones that Harry Dresden, wizard extraordinaire, sometimes fights and sometimes befriends. Blood Rites is the sixth book in the Dresden Files series that follows Harry Dresden. If you aren't familiar with the series, I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a light, funny urban fantasy. 

With Blood Rites, I kind of lost track of what happened in the last book but was quickly caught up thanks to a Fandom Wiki. Now that I've finished this one, I have mixed feelings about it. There were a lot of good background story reveals, which I loved. There was a healthy dose of sarcasm, which is always appreciated, but the book just felt different. I felt like it lacked a lot of overall plot and character development. It was primarily focused on the Raith Vampire Clan, and honestly, it made Dresden seem like a giant pig. That stuff usually doesn't bother me much beyond an eye-roll, but it just seemed really over the top and excessive. 

I felt like the entire book was Dresden either drooling over Lara or someone hitting on Murphy and just being downright gross. Apparently, at some point, it became necessary for Karrin to take her pants off to diffuse a bomb because her ass might trip the tripwires. For the vast majority of the book, I felt like I was reading those memes of male authors writing female characters. 

The thing that really saved Blood Rites from all of this was the fact that I enjoy the series and the sarcasm. We got some interesting back story about Dresden's mom and some other long-lost relatives he didn't realize he had. There's also quite a bit of story behind why he was sent to Ebenezer. I'm really intrigued by these inclusions and am curious to see where it takes the story. 

Overall, I enjoyed parts of the story and look forward to continuing the series at some point. Hopefully, in between books 6 and 7, Dresden takes a cold shower and calms down the caveman behavior. I'm somewhat begrudgingly giving Blood Rites three moons. I don't do half-moons, and I don't feel it warranted a two. I'm not sure what's up next for reading yet. I have a massive to-be-read list, per usual. So many books, so little time.