Jim Butcher’s Storm Front is the first of his Dresden Files books, which mix urban fantasy with noir detective elements to make... fairly generic supernatural mystery stuff, really.
I don’t care for noir — I’ve never even read Chandler — and I actively despise urban fantasy these days, so when I say that I liked this book and ordered the sequels immediately upon finishing it, you should take that as high praise. There are elements of the book that don’t work well (despite what the narrator and characters claim, it’s not set in any Chicago I recognize, for instance), but by and large it’s fast-paced fluffy enjoyment, with snappy writing, memorable characters, and non-obvious plotting. It’ll be up to the sequels to determine if this is just genre filler or something that transcends generic-ness, but so far so good.
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