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Received book in great condition and in record time.Good reading that you don't want to put down.Love getting things from amazon. Always a good experience.
Did the publishers suddenly change their minds. Regarding the use of this book on Kindle - it USED to be speech enabled, allowing a Kindle user to play the book in your car so you could hear it while you drove (or any other place, if you wanted to give your eyes a rest). Is the support for text-to-speech disappearing from our Kindles. Now, all of a sudden, it's no longer speech enabled (text-to-speech). What gives. I bought Kindle BECAUSE it had the text-to-speech ability, and now that seems to be getting more and more useless for the books I want to buy. Horrible.
DEATH MASKS is a reprint of an earlier Harry Dresden and it's interesting to see where he's been as Butcher continues to develop both the character and the world in which he lives. When a fallen angel joins the attack, Dresden knows there's a connection.
First, there's the TV show where his magic manages to break down the cameras and put a quick end to things. Then there's the red court vampire challenging him to a duel.
Harry Dresden's day starts bad and gets worse. All of this happening at once, though, strains the realm of coincidence.
The priest claims to be a skeptic, but he hires Harry to help find the Shroud of Turin which has been stolen, possibly in association with Chicago's crimelord. Not to mention the attempted assassination as Harry leaves the studio or the arrival of ex-girlfriend Susan who 'wants to talk.' As Murphy points out,, women don't have to set you up for a happy-talk.As Chicago's only Yellow-Pages wizard, Harry Dresden gets his share of weird cases.
What, exactly, lies at the heart of the danger, though, is hard to figure.Author Jim Butcher combines an interesting and conflicted character (can't keep a girlfriend, lives in a cellar, his best friend's wife hates him, he talks more to a skull than women), a dark-side of Chicago world, vampire wars and mythology to write a compelling urban fantasy. DEATH MASKS is a strong effort with plenty of action, enough character angst to keep us interested in the people, and a nice dose of magic.
I will keep on buying his books because he writes in a very good manner.You will sink in the book and live the adventures of Harry Dresden in all oftheir glory. A truly amazing book.
This is the fifth novel in the DRESDEN FILES series and takes place a short time after the events of SUMMER KNIGHT. Only a few mortals are aware of this, not realizing that much of the unexplained tragedies in the news have explanations that lie in the magical world. Harry soon found that his uncharacteristically good luck quickly morphed into his more usual bad sort.
Even Harry though was taken by surprise when he discovered that the missing item was the Shroud of Turin. This series is a humorous, dark urban fantasy that features a Wizard, wise cracking Harry Dresden who works as a private detective in Chicago. Our hero, Wizard Harry Dresden has been hired to locate and retrieve a missing object, a fairly routine task for a private detective, even one who specializes in cases involving the magical realm.
In addition to the competition over the Shroud, Harry found himself challenged to a duel, one that would be refereed by one of the more unusual magical creatures that Harry had encountered. An even nastier surprise was that others were in pursuit of the Shroud as well, including some particularly tough demons. Harry thought he had a home field advantage when he tracked down the Shroud on his home turf of Chicago, and was even more pleased when his former lover, Susan returned from her self imposed exile.
The premise is that the magical world of fairies, demons, and vampires co-exists with the mundane one just beneath the surface. The overall story arc of this series is quite pronounced, so much so that the novels should be read in as close to order as possible for maximum enjoyment.
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