I thoroughly enjoyed the ending myself . I felt like it tied things together without being cheap . <| sep |> Okay , let ' s fight ! In an amicable fashion , I hope ! The Dresden books have the trappings of mystery novels there ' s a client , some unresolved question , a fedora or two , yada yada . And then Harry Dresden goes out , gets in some scuffles , and eventually someone explains the plot of the novel to him . What they don ' t do and if you don ' t have this , you don ' t have a true detectivemystery novel is let the reader play along and engage in hypothesis formation , weighing of evidence , forming new theories and rejecting old ones , etc . If the reader can ' t beat the detective to the solution at least in theory , then it ' s not a mystery novel . And none of the Dresden books that I ' ve read pass that test . Dude has some adventures in a trench coat on behalf of a client , zaps the occasional ogre , ogles the occasional elfnipple , then 250 pages later someone explains what it was all about and at no point did the reader ever had a shot at figuring it out . Disqualified . A good mystery encourages the reader to turn their brain up to 11 the Dresden Files encourage the reader to turn his or her brain off . By way of contrast , I ' d say that Mike Carey ' s Felix Castor novels or the early Charlie Parker books by Connolly , while covering similar urban fantasy territory , do function as proper mysteries . The reader can properly play along with the author and form hypotheses . When these books work which is not always , it ' s because the author came up with an even better explanation for the mystery than the one he ' d led the reader to . Nothing like that really happens in the Dresden Files . They ' re adventure stories in a fedora and lack that play along at home sensibility that makes a true mystery . Anyway , that ' s my $ 0 . 50 take on the topic . Cheers !