All but one of these short stories have been published before, in one or another anthology, but I don't read a lot of short-story anthologies, and picked this book up only for the sake of the final story, which takes place a few hours after the end of Changes, the latest full-length novel in the Dresden Files series that I am addicted to, the story-world within which all the stories take place
Jim Butcher uses several of these stories to bring out elements of the series that have not appeared in the novels - to narrate from the perspective of characters other than Harry Dresden (Harry's half-brother, the vampire, and Harry's bff Murphy, the cop), or to tell a story with a lighter tone than the nail-bitingly suspenseful and high-stakes novel series. Other stories just read like shorter versions of the kinds of problems Harry deals with in the novels: a crime or spate of magic/monster-related crimes occurs in Chicago, Harry the wizard PI, with help from one or more of his sidekicks, confronts the perps and removes the menace.
The only short story in this collection that didn't thoroughly please me was "Last Call." Not that it was awful, but it just didn't seem all that fresh. I like the Dresden Files series for Harry's mixture of doofus and daredevil, and Murphy's strong action-heroine mojo, and even some of the amusement of recognizing a genre cliche...but I found "Last Call" a little too strong on the latter.
"Aftermath," the one previously unpublished story, written from the perspective of Murphy, performed pretty much as expected. It added new action and developed some key character relationships in the series, while leaving the reader in the dark about the major unresolved question at the end of Changes.
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