What a step back from the excellent last novel. Butcher has no business writing women still, with the introduction of Molly as an explicitly underage girl characterized as having a great rack and behaving in a way that paints Harry in a good light, while once again, literally every woman in the story is wrong and/or fully responsible for the conflicts introduced. Honestly a bit baffling. Even Charity, Molly’s mother, ends up in a bad light, having projected her pretty legitimate negative feelings towards Harry, with a reveal. And then she only has some agency by showing some masculine traits, after Harry notices it’s no wonder Molly has a great rack, since her mom does too.

There’s such a generational gap with these. It pioneered urban fantasy formula and popularized tropes already around. The way everyone speaks and Harry’s internalized chauvinistic code reads laughably antiquated now. It’s maybe no wonder that the best written and most natural novel so far is the one with just the boys. Even if Harry has to remind the reader he’s no “pansy” every time he does something physical, or else show there’s nothing wrong with being gay, but he’s certainly not.

There is some cool stuff in this one, but it manages to get undermined with the weird sexual stuff and a really short plot stuffed into the longest offering yet. There’s some cool stuff with the fae, but the plot hook, with murders tied to Molly somehow, at a horror convention, just wasn’t all that interesting.