Ghost Story

Ghost Story, an installment in The Dresden Files urban fantasy series, opens in the aftermath of the previous novel, Changes, in which Harry Dresden, a professional wizard and private investigator, destroyed the Red Court of vampires to rescue his daughter Maggie, killing her mother Susan Rodriguez to fuel the blood curse. Harry was then shot by a sniper and fell into Lake Michigan.

Rather than reaching the afterlife, Harry appears on spectral train tracks in a liminal version of Chicago. Sergeant Ron Carmichael, a deceased Chicago police detective who had partnered with Harry's close friend Karrin Murphy, pulls him from an oncoming train and brings him to a precinct-like office in a space called "Between." There, Captain Jack Murphy, the deceased father of Harry's close friend Karrin Murphy, explains that dark forces broke cosmic rules to arrange Harry's murder. Jack sends Harry back to Chicago as a ghost to find his killer, warning that three people Harry loves will be harmed if he fails.

Harry arrives on a snowy May night, six months after his death, at the home of Mortimer Lindquist, an ectomancer who communicates with the dead and with whom Harry has previously worked on supernatural cases. About a foot and a half of unseasonable snow blankets the city. There Harry meets Sir Stuart Winchester, the ghost of a Colonial-era marine captain guarding Mort's home. When a wraith, a ghost driven mad by the loss of its identity, attacks, Harry discovers his magic is gone. Sir Stuart destroys the wraith, explaining that memories are the currency of power among spirits.

Mort refuses to help, and both he and Sir Stuart suggest Harry may be merely a shade, a ghostly impression rather than the true Harry Dresden. An assault interrupts them: wraiths and lemurs, powerful malevolent ghosts, attack Mort's home under the command of a mysterious entity Harry calls the Grey Ghost. Sir Stuart's company of guardian spirits fights them off, but the Grey Ghost severely wounds Sir Stuart. When a mortal intruder breaks in, Harry accidentally merges with Mort's body and casts a defensive spell from within. Under escalating pressure, Mort agrees to help Harry briefly.

At Murphy's home, Harry observes how the fall of the Red Court created a global power vacuum. The Fomor, an ancient coalition of supernatural exiles, now abduct people with magical talent worldwide. Murphy leads a fragile alliance of werewolves, minor practitioners, and others to protect Chicago. With Mort relaying his words, Harry proves his identity. Molly Carpenter, Harry's former apprentice, confirms his spirit using her magical Sight, a wizard's faculty for perceiving the true supernatural nature of things. Gaunt and unstable, Molly operates as the "Rag Lady," using illusion magic to frighten supernatural predators and fill the deterrent role Harry's reputation once served. She trains under harsh conditions with the Leanansidhe, Harry's faerie godmother, sent by Queen Mab, ruler of the Winter Court, a powerful faerie faction.

A drive-by shooting wounds a practitioner and kills a neighbor. Harry follows the gunmen and discovers they are teenagers led by Fitz, a resourceful boy controlled by Aristedes, a sorcerer who dominates street kids through violence and mind magic. Recognizing echoes of his own abusive upbringing, Harry resolves to help Fitz.

The next evening, Harry finds Mort's house burned. The Grey Ghost captured Mort and nearly destroyed Sir Stuart, who passes Harry his spectral pistol as a symbol of authority over Mort's gathered spirits before fading into an empty shade. Harry is rescued from a subsequent attack by Waldo Butters, a medical examiner who carries Bob the Skull, Harry's former spirit of intellect. Bob reveals he previously separated his dark memories into a being called "Evil Bob," now serving the Grey Ghost. Bob also reveals that Harry is not a normal ghost but a naked soul; if destroyed, the annihilation would be permanent. He raises the possibility that Harry's body might still exist.

Harry scouts the Grey Ghost's underground lair and identifies the entity as the Corpsetaker, a body-switching necromancer Harry killed years earlier. The Corpsetaker tortures Mort, repeatedly lowering him into a pit of wraiths, to extract consent for possession; she needs a body with significant magical talent to restore her powers. She has allied with the Fomor to attack Murphy's group once she regains physical form.

Harry recruits Fitz and directs him to Father Forthill, a Catholic priest, for shelter. When Forthill independently confronts Aristedes and is beaten, Butters and Fitz mount a rescue, with Butters impersonating a Warden, an enforcer of the White Council, the governing body of human wizards. Though Aristedes wounds Daniel Carpenter, Michael Carpenter's eldest son, and knocks Butters unconscious, Fitz challenges the sorcerer. The other children choose Fitz over their abuser, dropping their weapons.

Sheltering in his grave at Graceland Cemetery, Harry discovers he can access magic through memory, recreating past spells by reliving the emotions that originally powered them. The Leanansidhe provides three truths about his killer: the killer is someone Harry knows, has thousands of deaths on his hands, and acted as proxy for a more powerful being.

Harry uses Sir Stuart's pistol to summon the spirits of Chicago and reconstitutes his wizard's staff from memory, assuming command of both the guardian ghosts and the dangerous shades Mort had gathered. Molly opens a Way, a passage to the Nevernever (the spirit world), and Harry leads his ghost army through. They fight past Evil Bob's fortifications, and Bob engages his dark counterpart while Harry's forces breach the Corpsetaker's lair.

Harry duels the Corpsetaker while his spirits destroy her defenses. She then drops her remaining wards deliberately, wanting Murphy's team to enter so she can possess new bodies. Murphy breaches the hideout with the werewolves and Molly. The Corpsetaker puts Murphy and the wolves to sleep, body-swaps into Butters, and shoots Harry's manifested form, reducing him to a barely visible wisp. Molly initiates a soulgaze, a mutual psychic confrontation, pulling the Corpsetaker into battle inside Molly's mind.

Harry follows them into the mindscape and discovers a suppressed memory: after breaking his back and learning of Maggie's capture, he called Jared Kincaid, a mercenary, and arranged his own assassination. He then had Molly remove the memory so that Mab would not detect the plan. Molly has carried the guilt of complicity alone for six months.

Time freezes. Uriel, an archangel, appears and explains that one of the Fallen, a group of fallen angels, whispered a lie into Harry's thoughts at his most vulnerable moment, adding enough guilt to push his decision toward self-destruction. This whisper compromised Harry's free will, and Uriel's role is to balance the scales.

In the physical world, Mort frees himself and commands the gathered wraiths against the Corpsetaker. Molly holds the necromancer in place while the wraith tide destroys her. Butters's spirit is restored to his body, and the team survives.

Uriel shows Harry his loved ones: his half-brother Thomas, a White Court vampire—a breed that feeds on psychic and emotional energy rather than blood—who has sunk into depression, and his daughter Maggie, safe at the Carpenter home with Mouse, Harry's temple dog. Uriel offers three choices: work for his organization, move on to eternal judgment, or fade as a ghost. He then delivers his permitted seven words, affirming that Mab cannot change who Harry is.

Harry chooses to step through the door, and wakes alive in a cave on Demonreach, a mysterious island in Lake Michigan. Mab reveals she retrieved his body from the water and spent six months keeping it alive while his soul wandered. Harry is the Winter Knight, Mab's mortal champion and enforcer, and she claims him. Harry establishes terms: he will serve effectively but maintain his identity. If Mab tries to change who he is, he will become deliberately mediocre. Mab grudgingly accepts, and Harry prepares to begin his service, alive but forever changed by what he has learned about the consequences of his choices and the nature of his own soul.