Erika VS Anita Blake (Burnt Offerings chapter 1-6)

I was in the tenth grade when a friend of mine excitedly handed me the first Anita Blake book. Those of you who know anything about Anita Blake are probably a little alarmed at the idea of a 15-year-old picking it up. The first book isn't that messed up, and actually only ever gets as far as a kiss. The story does not spiral wildly out of control into a non-stop train of orgies and violence (sometimes violent orgies) until further into the series. Those I was definitely too young to be reading, but the first few books were okay.

...I think. It was awhile ago, okay?

Still, I'm curious and afraid, so, I'm grabbing the seventh book in the series, Burnt Offerings, and seeing how badly I get burned reading it. Wow, that joke was awful. I'm so sorry. Not sorry enough to edit it out, but it's close. I'm starting with the seventh because, honestly, why should we all have to shuffle through the less weird and fucked up books when I can probably remember enough to keep us all up on what's going on? Well, maybe not... up, but, you know. Not totally lost.

For those of you who have never heard of the Anita Blake series, it's the prototypical urban fantasy about a necromancer-detective-vampire slayer who is also the (human) female leader of the local werewolves. Well, sort of werewolf Queen? She was boning their "alpha" (or what ever they're called) so he knighted her or some shit? They broke up because he ate a person. Like you do. Listen, I read these books over a decade ago. Give me some slack. Oh, she also has sex with vampires and there are were-critters and stuff. She has sex with those too. The books are also all in first person. Because this blog has apparently not seen enough first person books.

We're dropped in with Anita in some sort of work meeting with a convenient bit of character building that shows her as thoroughly professional and even-tempered.

My right arm had been sliced open twice by a knife. One scar was white and old. The second was still pink and new. My left arm was worse. A mound of white scar tissue sat at the bend of my arm. I'd have to lift weights for the rest of my life or the scars would stiffen and I'd lose mobility in the arm, or so my physical therapist had said. There was a cross-shaped burn mark, a little crooked now because of the ragged claw marks that a shapeshifted witch had given me. There were one or two other scars hidden under my blouse, but the arm really is the worst.

Bert, my boss, had requested that I wear my suit jacket or long-sleeved blouses in the office. He said that some clients had expressed reservations about my ah . . . occupationally-acquired wounds. I hadn't worn a long-sleeved blouse since he made the request. He'd turned the air conditioner up a little colder every day. It was so cold today I had goose bumps. Everyone else was bringing sweaters to work. I was shopping for midriff tops to show off my back scars.

So mature and professional. Then again, her boss also seems like a tosser, so, fight petty with petty I guess. She's in a meeting with a firefighter, McKinnon, who's a friend of her cop-boss, Dolph (not her necromancer boss). McKinnon and Anita get into a pissing contest over who's the manlier man by showing off their scars, until Anita puts an end to it by grabbing the glass off of her desk and maintaining eye contact as she eats the whole thing. There are a lot of pissing contests like this, and honestly, I'm not sure there is ever a time in the series where they don't end with Anita just ending them. We know McKinnon is a tough but good dude because rather than pee on more things, he cuts to the chase of what he wants.

He tells a story about a scary pyrokenetic that went around burning down buildings with people in them and how messy and horrific that was (how he got his scars) before going on to explain he thinks he has another firebug on his hands. It's still early, but he wants to catch this before the bodies start piling up again.  So yeah, Anita isn't officially on this yet, but once people start dying she obviously will be, so, uh, maybe look over the file? Anita, a woman who works with cops in her spare time, shrugs, isn't sure what she can do--pyrokenetics aren't monsters, just people with a rare skill--but she'll look it over. A strange touch of world building, just, yeah, magic happens, it's weird, but, wevs. Then again, if I was shagging a vampire, I would probably have a very different thresh hold for weird.

Before she has a chance, her vampire-slaying apprentice calls. He had been sent to stake some dead bodies that would, in a few days, rise as vampires (it's cool; it was in their will to stake them if this came up).  Basically he's all "Hey mom, can you pick me up from school the hospital" and she's all "Did you lose a fight again? As your slayer mom I'm not mad but I am disappointed; I told you to wear your 'I'm little and cute but I'll fuck you up' shirt until you build up your reputation" and he's all "I'M TWENTY-ONE I'M AN ADULT" and she's like "Do you want me to bring you a juicebox or not?"

He explains that someone tried to get him to stake a vampire but "lost" the paperwork. He refuses, because staking a vampire without paperwork is just murder, which he isn't super keen on. (As opposed to notarised murder, which is fine.) The orderly went looking for it while he went to grab a smoke, but came back to find this woman trying to murder this dude and got mangled with one of his own stakes when he tried to stop her. No one is dead, but this is a handy way to do some world-building and bring new readers up on the setting. She was a member of a splinter group (splintered from what?) called Humans First, which is going around trying to kill vampires like they're abortion providers. There's also Humans Against Vampires who are annoying but operate within the law. There was also a vampire mayor in Michigan who got staked recently, which Humans First is taking credit for. Anita doesn't think they're organized enough to have pulled that off. I assume this will be relevant information later. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Hamilton is just throwing around random world events for funsies. I don't remember if she's actually a good writer or not!

Anita gets her baby sidekick home and tucks him into bed after scolding him for leaving a vampire unattended in a morgue and leaving his vampire murdering kit unattended.

This is why you got mangled, Larry. You're too careless, Larry. You should shoot more people, Larry. Larry, in a great deal of pain, isn't too thrilled with being lectured, but he takes it because what else is he gonna do, get out and walk? His back has been replaced with stitches.

Once he's properly drugged and tucked into bed, Anita returns a call from a mystery number on her pager. I am cackling because googling the number isn't even an option to find out what it is. Also she has a pager. I know, I know, at the time this book came out it was a big deal, but to be honest, I thought pagers were funny when they made sense. Turns out it's a werewolf friend of hers, Stephen, who needs her help. Some were-panther is hurt and he needs her help to keep him from being dragged off by his irresponsible pimp. We get a quick fill in of how things are with the were-panthers: Not Good. (Anita killed their alpha because he was planning to make a snuff film starring the two of them.) It's deeply fucked up, which she owns, and admits she's forcing herself to be blasé about it because otherwise she's gonna lose her shit and she has things to do today still. Like, go make sure no one is pimped irresponsibly, apparently. This series is very pro safe, responsible pimps and sex workers. (Although most of the sex workers we meet are male if memory serves.)

Anita's response to Stephen's phone call is basically "I don't wannaaaaa" and Stephen is like "This guy has the worst pimp, Anita!  STRIPES AND ANIMAL PRINT, ANITA!" and then the villain drops in like "Are you phoning for help?  I have like one rule and it's 'no phoning for help', man" and Stephen begs off with "Please don't violence me I AM A SNUGGLING WOLF not a fighting wolf".  Villainous dude grabs the phone to threaten Anita as well, she yawns for a while and then asks his name (Zane) because she is an old-fashioned lady to likes a proper introduction before she breaks a man.  Zane does some "Grr, I'm a werepanther" posturing, Anita is just "Fool, by hurting my dog you activated my limit break" and hangs up.


She loads her gun with a few lead bullets in preparation. Silver bullets: werekitten is dead. Lead? Just a really bad day. Obviously, telling him "Dude I can literally kill you if I have to so knock this shit off" is not an option, but hurting him is. Anyways, into the hospital we go. Shockingly, Zane is causing shit. He keeps trying to use orderlies as hackeysacks. Not like, murdering anyone, but, you know, really one sided games of catch. She shoots him because hello is for losers, and makes it very clear he needs to stop this shit or she will murder him and feel very little about it. At this point he starts crying, relived that someone has come to be the new alpha of the werepanthers.

That is both my response, and Anita's. She figures if it avoids more people being used for ring toss, she can play along, but this is absurd. She isn't even a were-critter, and also, uh, she's like, the werewolf Queen and also something within the vampire community because now she's riding the local vampire leader on the regular. Also to keep her from exploding or some shit in a previous book the vampire had to mark her, therefore bonding the two and giving her some extra superpowers but also status in the vampire community? If Anita listed all her jobs and supernatural ties on her business card it would need to be two-sided and very small font.

The police come, cart off Zane, and Anita is left in the hospital room with her mangled werewolf friend, Stephen, while marveling at the deeply fucked up shit that happened to Nathaniel (the previously-mentioned werepanther who was being pimped out). I just--I don't even want to summarize it, because I feel like it's gross for the sake of shock value and disgusting, not because it actually adds anything. The only credit I will give is that Anita underlines "It doesn't matter if he's a sex worker, he could still be raped, and that is definitely part of what happened here".

A werewolf reporter pops up to check on Stephen and fill us in on werewolf politics. Richard, Werewolf King and Anita's ex, is out of town working on his Master's degree. While he's gone, since while Anita is Lupa (what they call Werewolf Queen I guess) she is decidedly removed from pack politics, another werewolf has stepped up to the plate to take care of the pups while he's gone. Her name is Sylvie and she is a naturally lovely and kind woman. Hah just kidding. She killed her way into the position to prove a point, and because the werepanthers under their old leader were a sack of shit, she has forbidden the wolves from helping. Cats and dogs, right?

Oh, Sylvie is also planning to like, double murder Richard to become the new Wolf King. We think. Anita still has Feelings for him, even if she made her choice to dump him because he eats people sometimes. For a vampire. Because drinking blood is fine I guess? She's aware that this logic is fucked up. So now she has to bully some werewolves to come watch their mangled friend who broke the rule by helping the pretty boy kitten, and probably have to fight Sylvie to do it. Being a normal human, that fight is going to end in Anita trying to murder her. Anita isn't thrilled with this, but eh, whatcha gonna do? Even Anita is getting concerned at her rapidly dwindling reserve of fucks. (Not the physical kind. She has many of those. So many.)

To keep things moving, Dolph, police dad, comes in to talk to Anita about what the ever-living fuck just happened, and there's this whole scene of them glaring at each other because she's fucking a vampire. He then blames himself for her having to hang out with monsters so much, and wonders if it's his fault, because she does it For Cases. The whole scene is kind of masturbatory, telling us how awesome and tough Anita is, but also that she's Damaged.

"You think like a cop, Anita. It's what makes you good."

"I think like a cop and like a monster. That's what makes me good."

He nodded, closed his notebook and slipped it into an inner pocket of his jacket. "Yeah, that's what makes you good."

THIS IS NOT WRITTEN AS A JOKE OR IRONICALLY, THIS IS ALL BEING PLAYED STRAIGHT. WE GET IT, SHE'S A TINY DELICATE FLOWER WHO BLEEDS MOTOR OIL SHE'S SO TOUGH.

That scene is followed up immediately by some werewolves coming to babysit the injured and a whole show of her being the pack dominant, the Lupa, and accidentally tapping into her ex's power to do it. Her vampire apparently bound them all together to keep them alive last book? (Look, none of us want me to wade through the whole series. Just trust me on that. So we're just going to have to accept some things are going to be question marks.) Anyway, it's the first time she felt his magic since they split, and she can tell even though he's very far away it pissed him the fuck off that she touched him that way. Which pisses her off and... you get the idea. Rage boners all around. The wolves then crawl around on the ground worshiping her a bit, trying to get belly rubs, and a nurse walks in before walking out very quickly.

Tuesdays, right?

This book is going to spend a lot of time with people being submissive to Anita, or her fighting to prove she shouldn't be submissive to them.

Tune in next time for Anita to go on a Hot Date with her vampire boyfriend, Jean-Claude Van Damme!

If anyone has read this series within the last decade and wants to point out anything important I've missed so far, please, chime in in the comments. Or just chat there anyways. It makes me feel good about myself.

Storm Front, chapters 1 and 2, in which Our Hero is one of the "nice" misogynists

I am left with a conundrum, readers.  After much contemplation and debate, I settled on reading some of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files now that WOT is on hiatus, and valued commenter Nerem provided me with a link to the ebooks so I could commence my analysis and thus provide you all with insight and entertainment.  I have wanted to check out Dresden for ages already, so I dove right in with gratitude to Nerem for assisting me in this quest.

I'm three chapters in and the question burns at the front of my mind: is Nerem in fact trying to destroy me?

The Dresden Files are urban fantasy very intentionally riffing off the style of Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake.  They concern Harry Dresden, working-class wizard-for-hire of Chicago.  I have never wanted to inflict violence on a protagonist so early in a story before.  Ender Wiggin is an unfortunate abused child.  Bean Delphiki even more so.  Rand al'Thor is a naive farmboy with typical teenage self-obsession.  These are people who can only bear so much responsibility for their faults.

I want to fight Harry Dresden.  But rather than just ranting, let me take you on a journey into Storm Front, the first book of the Dresden Files, and soon you, too, can feel the bone-deep certainty that the world will be made a better place when this jackass meets you in the pit.

(Content: misogyny, gore.  Fun content: I've been perusing my collection of reaction images to help me adequately respond to this tool.)

Storm Front: p. 1--?*

Chapter One: These Chapters Don't Actually Have Titles So I'm Probably Just Going To Make Some Up--This One Will Be Called "The Very Banality And Innocence" Because I Love A Good 'The King In Yellow' Reference

This book is written in first-person, which is a powerful and dangerous tool for any writer to wield--there's no more powerful way to express your protagonist's persona to the reader, but it also raises questions of reliability and relativity, and an irritating narrator is to reader interest what burning windmills are to mad scientists.  If you want to know how badly a first-person narrator can skew your book's contents to readers, ask Vladimir Nabokov to stop spinning in his grave long enough to tell you how he feels about Lolita.  In the first chapter, this won't be too pressing a matter, but in chapter two we're going to very quickly run into some serious questions about how to write flawed characters.

We meet Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden (forgivably over-the-top) in his office, where a new mail carrier is delivering a package and snickering at his door, which reads:

HARRY DRESDEN--Wizard.  Lost Items Found. Paranormal Investigations. Consulting. Advice. Reasonable Rates. No Love Potions, Endless Purses, Parties, or Other Entertainment.

In general, recognising that 'love potions' are fucked up is a good way to get me to like you, so I want to open by giving Dresden points for that.  At least, I hope the reason he doesn't do love potions is because he understands they are mind-control drugs specifically optimised to override sexual consent.

The mail carrier is described as "a basketball with arms and legs and a sunburned, balding head", I y'all can bet I am going to be keeping a close gorram watch on how often Butcher makes characters fat when we're not supposed to like them.  He is initially amused, then skeptical, and finally calls Dresden "a nut" before leaving.

Any urban fantasy kind of needs to open by defining its parameters--whether people in general know about magic, what kind of organisation it has in society, whether it's resulted in any major differences from our own Earth history, all that worldbuilding jazz.  Dresden informs us that magic fell out of fashion and awareness in recent centuries because science was more exciting, but "images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who had allowed the television to raise their children" has pushed people away from "science, the largest religion of the twentieth century" and people are starting to notice magic and psychics and vampires again.

Allow me to provide a visual representation of the way I feel when people call science a religion:

Pictured: a baby harpy eagle who would rather not, today.

Science, performed and organised correctly, is about observation and reproducibility.  It is supposed to be about throwing out old ideas when new evidence contradicts them, about taking nothing for granted, and about always chasing new knowledge.  I don't know the details of every religion in the world, obviously, but I have yet to see one that tries to draw statistical conclusions about the effectiveness and consistency of prayer or invocation.  Religion is pretty big on dogma.  Science isn't supposed to be.  If you're going to call science a religion, I need you to define your terms.  (If Dresden is trying to comment on the way the populace supposedly assumed that the invention of the airplane and the computer meant no one would ever have problems ever again, okay, that can be his opinion, but I have a lot more to say about the way good scientists would approach the discovery of magic as well, which I will spare you all for now only because I need to get to the part where you share my ire towards this jackwagon.)

Anyway.  Dresden is behind on his bills and needs cash soon.  I have some questions about what magic can or cannot do, and why a person with a rare command over supernatural powers works this and only this fetch-quest kind of job.  Like, the absolute #1 question I have about magic in every single setting is 'can magic create food', because if it can, anyone with magical skills is a colossal upset to our normal economy--they don't need to worry about their own food supply and they literally always have access to a vital commodity they can trade to other people.  JK Rowling just declared that magic couldn't conjure food from nothing, which answered that question pretty firmly, except then she footnoted that magic can multiply food, which, in the words of Hermes Conrad, just raises further questions.  I'll allow Butcher more worldbuilding time before I start interrogating his hero's premise too harshly, though.

Dresden is quickly characterised for us as an honest worker; his only job in months was investigating a country singer's house in Missouri and quickly concluding that it was not haunted, unlike the fake psychic whom the singer hired a week later to perform a big fake exorcism.  Dresden describes his own actions as "honest, righteous, and impractical", and I roll my eyes at our hero humblebragging about his heart of gold.  The phone rings with a call from a nervous housewifey kind of person who wants Dresden to find her husband.  Dresden quickly says people aren't his specialty and she should go to the police, which wins him many more points from me than he got by telling me about his honesty dealing with the singer.  She tries to beg off by saying she can't go to anyone else, but Dresden cuts her off before she can hang up.

"I'm sorry, you didn't tell me your name." [....] 

"Call me Monica." 

People who know diddly about wizards don't like to give us their names.  They're convinced that if they give a wizard their name from their own lip it could be used against them. To be fair, they're right.

Dresden will keep doing this in the next couple of chapters: 'silly superstitious people who know nothing are afraid of X, but they absolutely should be afraid of it because it's terrifying and dangerous'.  It takes a specific kind of arrogance to call someone ignorant for believing a true thing even though it sounds fake.  Sigh.

Dresden convinces Monica to come to his office in an hour and explain her situation to him directly.  The moment he sets down the phone, it rings again, and a few lines of dialogue later he declares that the appointment is in forty-five minutes, which would be clever foreshadowing in a book about time anomalies but here just vexes me.  Harry Dresden would have seen nothing wrong with the many ages of Bonzo Madrid.  The second call is from Director of Special Investigations Lieutenant Karrin Murphy of the Chicago police, and she wants Dresden (her preferred magic consultant) at the scene of a double homicide pronto.  She's not worried about Dresden missing his appointment, because she is a gruff cop, and he snappishly agrees to go and be back in time anyway.  Murphy recommends that he not eat lunch on the way.

"How bad are we talking here, Murph?" 

Her voice softened, and that scared me more than any images of gore or violent death could have. Murphy was the original tough girl, and she prided herself on never showing weakness.

I brim with apprehension whenever a female character is described like this, because it strikes me as a guarantee that their tough front will eventually be shattered and they will be left a broken wreck to show that the situation is serious.  Has a male character ever been described like this?  Someone get on that.  (Also, calling an adult woman a 'tough girl' is a blaring orange flag that worse things are ahead.)

Dresden heads out, using the stairs instead of the elevator, half because electronics are unreliable in his presence and half because it's already occurred to him that if there's a murderous wizard on the streets, Dresden himself (the cops' only wizard-on-retainer) is probably a target as well.  Not bad tension-raising for the end of the first chapter.

Chapter Two: This Is It; This Is What I Was Talking About; How Badly Do You Want To Fight Dresden Now

Jim Butcher elects to give us a physical description of his protagonist by explaining all the ways he doesn't look like Murphy, which I kind of like, if only because the duality of it raises Murphy's profile as a secondary protagonist.  Dresden is an incredibly typical brooding gritty hero, tall and lean with dark hair and angular features, while Murphy is short, stocky, blonde and blue-eyed.  Dresden also immediately informs us that Murphy never wears dresses, "though I suspected she'd have muscular, well-shaped legs, like a gymnast", which is obviously not a weird thing to think about your boss.  He goes on with her description, adding her lack of earrings and her makeup-that's-so-good-it-looks-like-she's-not-wearing-makeup, which strikes me as oddly perceptive in a world so choked with men who apparently think women are born wearing a layer of foundation and Pomegranate Extremity lipstick.

Oh my god, Dresden even has a big black duster coat.  I hope Butcher was trying really hard to write to formula here.  Wikipedia seems to suggest that the cliches are intentional.  Anyway.  He also silently gives Murphy kudos for daring to meet his eyes for half a second:

It wasn't really dangerous unless you did it for several seconds, but I was used to anyone who knew I was a wizard making it a point not to glance at my face.

There is only so far I am willing to follow you down the trail of 'I have weird mysterious powers that people are superstitious and intimidated about', Dresden.  You're so powerful that it's dangerous to look into your eyes but you're also borderline unemployed and permanently broke?  I'm going to start needing justifications soon.

They head for the door and Dresden races Murphy so he can open it for her, even though and indeed because he knows it irritates her.  Ah, and here we are:

Maybe my values are outdated, but I come from an old school of thought. I think that men ought to treat women like something other than just shorter, weaker men with breasts. Try and convict me if I'm a bad person for thinking so.

Pictured: MI6 director M is entirely willing to take up Dresden's offer to go to court.

I enjoy treating a woman like a lady, opening doors for her, paying for shared meals, giving flowers--all that sort of thing.

Pictured: Special Agent Dana Scully will tell Dresden when she wants his opinion on women again, which will be never.

I don't even know what to do with this.  "Men ought to treat women like something other than just shorter, weaker men with breasts."  Well, yes, that's true.  That's true for a lot of reasons, starting with women not being shorter, weaker men with breasts.  Faith and fucking begorrah.  I guess we'll start with the purely scientific objection, which is that men being stronger than women on average tells you basically nothing about whether any given man will be stronger than any given woman, because the variations within a gender are vastly greater than the difference in averages.  (Actual studies on this are not the easiest thing to find, especially if you want studies that aren't saturated with biases, bad methods, bad data presentation, and the occasional dash of MRA meninist whining.  Suffice perhaps to compare for yourselves the current world records in that manliest activity, lifting heavy objects: yes, the men's olympic lifting records are higher than the women's, but when comparing similar weight categories, the differences are fairly small and everyone is lifting multiple times their own body weight.  Dresden, bro, do you even lift?)

Next, Dresden, have you considered that maybe the correct way to treat women is LIKE PEOPLE?  Chivalry isn't dead--it's a fricking zombie that refuses to die no matter how many times we bury it because it feeds on the keening wails of men who don't understand why opening doors for women just won't translate into getting laid.  I sometimes open doors for women, I sometimes pay for meals for women, yes, and they do the same for me, and likewise with my friends who are men.  I do these things because they are nice things to do for people I like, not because I'm trying to provide women with the support they need to get over their fundamental deficiencies of ladyness.  So the real question here, Dresden, is why you're only doing nice things for women and not men.  WHY ARE YOU SUCH A MISANDRIST, DRESDEN?

Pictured: Tulio attempts to forget the conversation he just had with a brooding antihero with a heart of chauvinist gold.  Y'all don't even know the kinds of stupid, misogynist screeds I read with my own two eyes in my quest for good data.

In short, locking women into the kitchen to be barefoot and pregnant is unquestionably terrible, but that doesn't mean that putting them on a pedestal to be delicately cared for and pruned or whatever is somehow good.  And I might not be able to convict you for being a sexist creep, Dresden, but I can definitely judge you harshly.

Where were we?  Oh, yeah, double homicide.

Dresden follows Murphy up to the seventh floor to a plush romantic suite that smells of blood.  (The elevator scene is brief, silent, and actually kind of good: "I licked my lips and looked around the interior of the car. My shadow and Murphy's fell on the floor, and almost looked as though they were sprawled there. There was something about it that bothered me, a nagging little instinct that I blew off as a case of nerves. Steady, Harry.")  Murphy leaves him in the first room for a minute, where he examines his surroundings in a vaguely ESP kind of way, making visual observations with his eyes nearly shut, noting champagne, a stray rose petal, and a half-torn black thong under a chair, which Dresden summarises as "Kinky".  Dresden has not read Fifty Shades or he'd save that for the eggbeaters.

We are then introduced to Murphy's skeptical partner, Carmichael.  Dresden rattles off a laundry list of things that are meant to make Carmichael's unattractiveness clear, starting with being fat and bald, and then goes for a swerve with "razor intellect [....] absolutely ruthless at tracking down killers".  I tentatively mark this as the second fat character we've met and the second we're not supposed to like, regardless of the 'razor intellect' remark supposedly showing that Dresden respects him.  They snipe at each other a bit before Dresden comes in to see the bodies.

Now, I realise magic is at play here, but I think it's fair to question how and why it is that these people (who died in the middle of sex) managed to remain frozen in the exact pose they had when an evil wizard literally made their hearts explode like fragmentation piñatas.  The description "she was astride him, body leaned back, back bowed like a dancer's" sounds to me like she's still more or less sitting upright, no?  Either way, now we're apparently seated in the 'erotic violence' section of the train and I'm prepared to tuck and roll.

Clues, blood, gross stuff, clues, and then Dresden finally runs out of the room to throw up--Carmichael wasn't joking when he said he'd bring a bucket.

Dresden's frantic disgusted thoughts weave in some worldbuilding:

...someone had used magic to do it. They had used magic to wreak harm on another, violating the First Law. The White Council was going to go into collective apoplexy. This hadn't been the act of a malign spirit or a malicious entity, or the attack of one of the many creatures of the Nevernever, like vampires or trolls. This had been the premeditated, deliberate act of a sorcerer, a wizard, a human being able to tap into the fundamental energies of creation and life itself.

So now we know magic does have some kind of organisation ('White Council' isn't the name I would choose, but... okay...) and laws, and we have a sort of charmingly juvenile name, 'Nevernever', for the realm of monsters.  And we're only in the second chapter!  Can you imagine how many posts into a WOT book I'd have to get before we heard about 'the Nevernever, what some call Monsterpalooza, where dwells the Scarytown Crew that you know as the Naz'gool'.

Dresden does tend a little bit that way when he starts talking magic:

"Evocation is the most direct, spectacular, and noisy form of expressed magic, or sorcery. [....] 

"What's the other option?" Murphy asked. 

"Thaumaturgy," I said. "As above, so below. Make something happen on a small scale,and give it the energy to happen on a large scale."

Which isn't bad terminology, really.  'Evocation' literally means 'calling something forth', while 'thaumaturgy' means 'magic-shaping', following the same pattern as 'metallurgy'.  I feel some small spark of hope that this will be the first fantasy series I've seen to correctly use '-mancy' suffixes only to refer to divination magic.

There's more magic worldbuilding as Dresden explains the intimacy of spellcasting and concludes that the killer had to know the victims in order to use this particular magical approach, by having intense personal reasons to want them dead. Oh, great, before this chapter can end on a strong note we have to endure another one of Dresden's pontifications on gender:

Murphy glared at me. "You keep saying 'she,' " she challenged me. "Why the hell do you think that?" 

I gestured toward the room. "Because you can't do something that bad without a whole lot of hate," I said. "Women are better at hating than men. They can focus it better, let it go better. Hell, witches** are just plain meaner than wizards. This feels like feminine vengeance of some kind to me."

Pictured: WHATNAPPLE RETURNS TO AID ME

Are you fucking kidding me, Dresden?  Jim Butcher, what the fuck?  Please tell me you're going for an unreliable narrator here.  Please don't be actually this stupid.  Please let the killer also be a man just to highlight how wrong Dresden is.

"Christ, you are a chauvinist pig, Dresden."

Lieutenant Murphy, you have my sword.

Dresden sort of agrees to try to reverse-engineer the magic, and Murphy banishes Carmichael to fetch her coffee before explaining who the victims are: the woman is a sex worker for a well-regarded company run by a vampire ("vampiress" oh my god shut up Dresden) named Bianca, and the man is the personal bodyguard to Chicago's new king of the mob, Johnny Marcone, a relatively civilised crimelord who's put an end to past bloody clashes with the police and gone all Ankh-Morpork Guild of Thieves on excessive elements in the city, doing a better job of stamping out some violent criminals than the police do.

I had honestly forgotten what it was like to have antagonists with immediate presence who are relevant to their environment and not just, like, abstract concepts and generic monsters.  I bet I'd be enjoying this book less if I hadn't just endured so much WOT.

Dresden has tried to put a disclaimer on his ability to work out how the murder spell worked, but Murphy doesn't buy it.  Dresden weasels out of explaining himself, but notes in the narration that he's got some kind of checkered past with the White Council and he's on double secret wizard probation, bearing something called the Doom of Damocles.  I like the name because it's self-explanatory (danger hanging over his head) without sacrificing some mythic flavour.  Anyway, Dresden's pretty sure he'll get a Doom to the head if word gets out that he's trying to build a murder spell, and apparently sending advance notice ("Hey, I'm tracking a murderer who broke our First Law, please don't kill me") is not an option?  He instead concludes that he'll just need to keep it quiet.  Brilliant.  If this incident is so bad, shouldn't the Council have their own investigators on the case?  Shouldn't they at least be able to spare someone to keep an eye on Dresden while he helps the police?  What are the jurisdictional rules for something like this?

They leave, Dresden's got five minutes to make the fifteen-minute trek back to his office for his appointment with Monica the mystery client, and he's halfway there when he gets surrounded by beefy goons who forcibly invite him to get into a car with Johnny Marcone, and that is where the chapter ends.

Initial impressions: Harry Dresden is a gigantic tool made of smaller tools in a sort of fractal jackwagonry array, but Murphy is a good character, I'm interested in the setting, and within a mere two chapters we've got a web of plot threads that connect us to a mysterious disappearance, a vengeful sorcerer, a vampire madam, organised crime, and the secret council that runs all magic. Rand al'Thor needs more pagetime than that to eat lunch and stare longingly at the hot girl he imagines he's in love with.  I may brim with rage throughout this book, but at least it won't linger.

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*Thanks to ebook formatting, the pagecount varies wildly depending on how I size my reader screen, so I have little hope of keeping a consistent tally of pages as we proceed.  I'm tempted to use abstract concepts (Storm Front: p. Mangrove to Banyan) but combining that with my suggested chapter titles is just going overboard.

**ALSO I HAVE STRONG OPINIONS ON THE GENDERING OF WITCH AND WIZARD.  That's not how it works.  'Wizard' is just 'intensely wise', following the pattern of 'drunkard' and 'coward'.  'Witch' derives from 'wicce', which has a contested etymology to say the least, but originally 'wicca' was male and 'wicce' was female, and we melded both words when we took them for English.  Female wizards and male witches are 100% legit, not a weird special case, and definitely not gendered terms for identical roles.  (I'll stop here instead of further ranting on the notion that 'warlock' is the male equivalent of witch.)