Skin Game

Skin Game is the fifteenth novel in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, published in 2014, and it turns the series into a heist story. Harry Dresden is still recovering from the books before it, cut off from most of his friends and sharing his skull with a passenger that is slowly killing him.

The crew assembled for the job is the joke at the centre of the novel: a fallen angel who has tried to kill Harry more than once, a mercenary who binds spirits, a warlock, and a thief Harry last met during an earlier case. His insurance is Karrin Murphy, who has no intention of letting him walk into this alone, and Butcher gives the planning and the double-crossing as much energy as he gives the fights.

What makes it more than a caper is the company Harry keeps between jobs. The novel brings back Michael Carpenter and his household, and it gives Harry time with his daughter, whom he has spent the series keeping at a distance for her own protection. Butcher has been building toward both of those reunions for several books, and the payoff is quiet rather than heroic, which suits a series that has already spent most of its grand gestures. It is a book in the middle of a long arc, and it assumes a reader who understands why the vault, the sword and the island all matter.