I dropped off after Skin Game, which was pretty good, Dead Beat and Fool Moon. I’ve heard he hasn’t gotten any better at female characters. How are the more recent ones?
I didn’t realize that people were critical of his portrayal of female characters. From what I recall, those characters were routinely displayed as strong and very capable figures. I thought the books were wonderful, though I have to confess I read all 17 in a straight through binge last year. I thought they were all quite good, and only got better as the story progressed.
Skin Game was the third-most-recent, and I thought it was one of the best of the series.
The most recent two are the two-parter (originally planned as one book, but it grew too large) Peace Talks and Battle Ground, and they were much less impressive. There was a long gap before those, and I think that in that time, he lost track some of where he was going. They also have something of a rushed feel to them, like he’s eager to get the series over and done with.
Do I read the OP correctly to mean that those three were the only ones you’ve read? That’s something of an odd selection, scattered all over the series. I’d imagine that with the way Dresden’s power steadily grows as the series goes on, jumping between them like that would be disorienting.
Oh no, sorry. I wrote sloppily. Just those were my favorites. And I’ve heard that he was working towards Harry/Molly, which would be squicky. But I’m happy to try them again if people think they’re still decent. I liked Harry better as a street magician and private eye, but that’s me.
Oh, you might also want to check out some of the short story collections-- I think the most recent is Brief Cases. At least, one of the stories in it (“Day One”) is definitely after Skin Game, starring a certain character who had the most badass moment at the end of that book. Also whichever collection it was that contained “The Warrior”.
Thanks! I remember reading a shorter story starring Thomas awhile ago but I’ll check that out too.
You read books with female characters?
If you’ve never been a fan of a possible Harry/Molly romantic pairing, no such pairing has happened yet in the most recent books.
What do you mean?
I’ve just been rereading some Robert Crais novels. Your OP made me realize there aren’t many/any female characters other than in the background.
Oh ok. I thought maybe I’d posted something along the way that gave an odd impression of myself (which is quite likely). 
Nor is likely to happen. Molly probably still has a crush on Harry, but certain things revealed in one of the short stories make it very unlikely that anything will ever come of it.
Good to hear. The way he kind of watched her grow up would make that seem weird to me. YMMV of course.
Then again, given that wizards routinely live for hundreds of years, that sort of thing is probably not uncommon in the community. A 20-year age gap is seriously squicky when it’s a 35-year-old and a 15-year-old, but those two will eventually be 100 years old and 80 years old (and still close to their physical primes), and it’s a lot harder to view those ages as squicky. After a certain point, an old wizard has probably watched most of the wizarding community grow up.
I mean, Harry has been in a relationship with someone who was not only already an adult during his childhood and probably knew him when he was in his teens, but was already an adult during Wyatt Earp’s time.
True, I’d forgotten about that. I was thinking about when she showed up at his room and Bob was drooling.
The series is incredible and progressively gets better with every book, the first several books were very pulpy but the latter are more epic fantasy. Not as high-minded as Tolkien, but grander. It’s a noir character and series, which carries with it some clichés. The biggie is the femme fatale which is part and parcel with the genre. So if you don’t like femme fatale characters you’ll probably have issues. Though as the series progressed the noir vibe starts being downplayed and the more traditional fantasy vibe comes to the fore, which means fewer of the “Private Dick” tropes.
Butcher was still a teen/college kid when he started writing the series and in the first few books that showed. The POV character Harry had a pretty juvenile way of thinking about women and a lot of characters, female ones most problematically, were one-dimensional at best and completely irrational at worst. These issues almost completely disappear by the 7th or 8th books. There are still staggeringly beautiful fae and vampire characters which is part of the mythology he’s built but that’s part of the world building. They act and talk like fully three dimensional individuals with agency who do more than make Harry horny. But…the character is narrated by a man and men think about sex a fair bit, it comes with the territory.
If you’ve read all the books up through Skin Game I don’t quite follow the OP. You’ve basically read every book but the last 2.5 so you should have a good idea of what the series is about after 15 books. In the last 2 books Harry ends up with a new love interest…so the Molly thing won’t be a problem.
Shrug I’d just heard that the more recent books were a bit weaker, and Ghost Story and Changes felt off to me (Maybe I just wasn’t as invested for some reason). But as I said, Skin Game was a lot of fun. Just wanted folks’ opinions before I invested, is all.
If you didn’t like Changes you should probably just move on. It’s the best and most important book in the series with the possible exception of Battle Ground.
Changes quite deliberately torpedoed a lot of Harry’s previous life and set up a new developmental arc. So on the one hand there’s a certain nostalgic longing for the Dresden we’d started out with, but the later books are worthy in their own right. Butcher has said that he plans to eventually lead up to a conclusion to the Dresden saga and Battle Ground was a major step in that direction:
Summary
The Masquerade is no more, after an open supernatural invasion.
I’ll give it another shot now that it’s been a while.