Blood Rites by Jim Butcher

[miko]

Blood Rites is the 6th novel in the Dresden Files series, an urban fantasy series in a bit of a noir style following private investigator and professional wizard Harry Dresden.

This series is well loved, and... I don't really know why. I started working through this series a long time ago, but had to stop because the last book I read was so violent and unpleasant a read that I skipped entire sections of it. That said, with some time between me and my distaste for that book, I didn't hate Blood Rites.

It's a pretty typical urban fantasy set around vampires. The writing's fine - obviously strong enough to set of my visceral "nope" factor in previous books - and the case was sufficient for this one. I know this sounds like damning with faint praise, and the reason for that is because the investigation is set at a porn studio and the vampires are equivalent to succubi/incubi. You'll be unsurprised to find that with such a terrible "sexy" set up, I'm loathe to actually make this a recommendation. Although there's no on screen rape, there is discussion of historical events and a bit of that scuzzy feeling like the author wanted it to be titillating instead of horrifying.

Sadly, as you well know, this is pretty typical in the genre. I'm a little numb to it, and it wasn't prominent across the whole book, so I'd still say I enjoyed this one more than the last one I read, but the main character still spends a lot of time thinking about how he really wants to protect women (because they're women), which grates on me. I'm trucking on with the series because I've been advised that it only gets better, but from what I've read so far, you're better off with another series.