Clearing the board

 There was some concern that Jim Butcher was going to end his long running Dresden Files with his new Battle Ground, but by the end, it's more like a musical Rondo, bringing the story back to the beginning, only with some new accoutrements. 

We pick up where Peace Talks left off, in the deep hours of Midsummer Night, as Ethniu and the Formor begin rising from Lake Michigan to repeat what a certain cow did year ago to Chicago. Given the book more or less climaxes at dawn, that's roughly 400 pages of the war for Chicago, as members of the Unseelie Accords combine to battle a Titan bearing the Eye of Balor. (For the record, this has been a recurring artifact in a few fictions I've read since this started. I guess mythology only has so many artifacts to dig up to destroy everything with.) 

It seems appropriate that one of the pop culture quotes that pops up is from Ghostbusters, since some of the battle is similar to that sequel, wherein The Winter Knight manages to get a seething mass of Humanity to rise up under his banner to help take on a varied mix of bad guys, including the return of the Black Court of Vampires (which also has a shout out to the best book in the entire series, Dead Beat.) 

While with the number of major characters dying throughout this battle, it does seem like this could be the end, it does, like I said, wind up feeling much more like resetting everything to new paradigm closer to how this all started. We get a few new plot threads for him to build off of, like whom Marcone is allied with, the true nature of who set this big battle in motion, and Mab's designs on securing particular alliances, as well as some new ideas that could easily fill volumes of their own, like Mab's long lost humanity, The Winter Lady's relationship with her parents, and whether or not Butcher isn't trying to sell us an Anakin Skywalker story over 20+ books. 

As an added bonus, there is a short story set about 6 months after the main event at the end. That one made me laugh and cry in the course of about 10 pages, particularly the idea that Queen Mab watched Frozen at some point.

Given how long we were between books before this two in a year, I wouldn't be surprised if Butcher takes another sabbatical, since this one really didn't end on a cliffhanger. (Really, the only major pressing event is set for a year from the ending. Everything else is background noise.)

So, in the end, it's a fitting ending to a particular chapter of the Files, and an interesting rearranging of pieces for a new chapter.