A nice little Dresden Files snack.

I really like these story collections because I don’t have the patience to track them all down in their various anthologies. Extremely convenient, thumbs up.

And to top it all off, I really enjoyed all the stories here. There were a couple in the last collection I was a little bored with, or that showed their age, etc. But they were all good here, entertaining and fit well into the larger Dresden Files universe. I especially liked that three of them took place after the events of Skin Game, because I need the next book ASAP. Those three were the last stories in the collection: “Jury Duty,” in which Harry gets, well, jury duty; “Day One,” which follows Butters in his first mission as a Knight of the Cross; and “Zoo Day,” which follows Harry, Maggie, and Mouse, with POVs from all three of them, as they head to the zoo for nominal father/daughter bonding.

I skipped several stories that I’d read before. I read all three Bigfoot stories when they were published in a bind-up a couple of years ago, and “Bombshells” was published in Dangerous Women, back when I was still attempting to enjoy large anthologies. But I remember enjoying all of them.

The only story in here that gave me weird feelings was “Cold Case,” which takes place just after the events of Cold Days, on Molly’s first official outing as the Winter Lady. I was enjoying this story so much during most of it. She unexpectedly teams up with Carlos Ramirez, and that was a thing I didn’t know I wanted until it happened, but the story turns bitter and ends very unhappily. So that was a bummer.

Overall, a very nice collection, and worth your time. I wish my library hold hadn’t been fifty people deep so I could have read it by audio (which features James Marsters, of course, but other narrators as well), but I was getting impatient and didn’t want to wait, so I did the hard copy