Perhaps the most impressive thing about The Dresden Files is that after seventeen books it can still surprise me from time to time and while “Battle Ground” is far from a perfect book or even a perfect Dresden Files book it could still surprise me several times. Beyond that it continues along the path that The Dresden Files has been doing for a long time. Dresden gets stronger, but so do his enemies. He walks the line of morality and explores the idea sacrificing your soul to protect other people.

There really isn’t a plot to explain in this book exactly. It is a massive fight across the entire city of Chicago, punctuated a few times by important events that I don’t want to spoil. But even the most important of those moments have to be left behind rather than becoming part of the story, not because the characters are ready to move on but because things are trying to kill them. They will be part of the bigger plot later, but for now they are just interesting or painful moments before the fight starts up again. That said, those moments are well worth the time required to read this book and if you take this as part of the series of the entire series rather than as a single book it’s almost as game changing as some of the most popular books in the series.

This is like every book in The Dresden Files series, a pleasure to read. Even in a book with moments that will hurt you, he fits in laughs and a lot of moments that make you feel better about it. More than that, a lot of characters, not just Harry, get the chance to shine in this book. Perhaps the character who gained the most in this book was Mab, who became a far more interesting character, but there were others. Michael remains one of my favorite characters in any book, and even though he isn’t in this as much as I might like, he gets two significant moments. We get a couple villains showing back up and a lot of allies. Some of them get more than others. Beyond that, the action is generally well written and feels as if there are consequences to it. Finally, Butcher has finally pulled the trigger on letting magic out of the shadows.

There are also a few things I didn’t love. The most important being that this isn’t really a complete book on its own. It is the second half of peace talks and it works far better when you consider it in that light. Beyond that, while the nonstop action for the first eighty percent of this book is generally well written because there are hundreds of pages it can both become exhausting and repetitive in part because of the need to constantly point out just how incredibly powerful the villain of this story. Harry being outclassed in power has become such a part of the Dresden File books that I really hope that at some point he fights someone who doesn’t outclass him magically just to shake things up.

At this point in a series, the only real comparison that makes sense is to other books in the series. I’m still close to this one, but I’d say it’s somewhere in the middle for me. It outranks the first couple of books because of the history and other because of a few exceptional moments. But honestly I hope that the next book slows things down and perhaps gets us a little closer to what drew me into The Dresden Files in which Dresden is on his own and has to figure out what is happening rather than him fighting an enemy so much more powerful than him he needs the help of gods just to have a chance.