Call Him Dirty Harry Potter

Wizards, beware! Jim Butcher’s detective Harry Dresden is the new scourge of the underworld, and he’s packing heat. And a serious online following.

Jim Butcher, the author of the newly released Turn Coat, the latest installment in supernatural detective series The Dresden Files, is not like other authors: He’s beaten a Brazilian witchdoctor’s death curse.

The witchdoctor hexed him 20 years ago during a youth-group trip to Rio de Janeiro. That weekend, the youths piled into a bus and rambled into the country to a town that consisted of a red brick market plaza. Butcher accompanied some girls from his group on their way to get a Coke. As they walked across the plaza, a skinny man stepped out of the jungle. He had a beard, and mud matted his hair. Snakes hung on his neck and arms and writhed through his belt loops. He wore amulets of human bone. As the man started screaming, the 17-year-old Butcher stepped between his pointing finger and the girls and took the death curse.

Harry Dresden never gallops up on a white horse—a zombie Tyrannosaurus rex, maybe—and he seldom makes it to the end of a book without serious injury.

Over the next few days, Butcher encountered a fresh jaguar footprint in the jungle one night, a giant poisonous spider in his luggage, and a large venomous snake in the shower. But he survived.

Harry Dresden, the wizard detective that Butcher created, is also a survivor. The last three books in the series were New York Times bestsellers, the forums on Butcher’s Web site boast more than 15,000 members, and this year Chicago’s only wizard detective turned heads in his graphic-novel incarnation, which has been nominated for a Hugo Award. Move over Twilight, True Blood, and Harry Potter; Mr. Dresden is in the building, and he has a gun.

Harry Dresden is the underworld’s Philip Marlowe, although he totes a blasting rod and other magical gear in addition to the typical .44. A quirky band of associates helps Harry throughout the series, including a polka-loving medical examiner, a vampire with a French alter ego who runs an upscale hair salon, a nosy tabloid reporter, and a pixie who calls Harry the Pizza Lord.

Turn Coat is the 11th book in what Butcher says will be a 20-plus book series capped by a three-book apocalyptic trilogy. Turn Coat was one of his favorite Dresden books to write, and Butcher says he’s in no danger of losing steam. “I’m bouncing up and down with anticipation of writing the next few,” he said.

Turn Coat. By Jim Butcher. 432 pages. Roc Hardcover. $26. Set in modern-day Chicago, the book begins like any good noir novel, with a man showing up half-dead at the antihero’s door asking for help. Morgan is warden of the White Council, and essentially Harry’s old mystical parole officer. Harry spent much of his youth under the Doom of Damocles because he broke the Laws of Magic when he killed his master with a spell, but then it was self-defense; Harry’s mentor had been forcing him to practice dark magic. The insufferably righteous Morgan had followed Harry for years, waiting for him to slip up and break the rules again. They despise each other, but apparently Harry hates injustice more than he hates Morgan, who has been wrongly accused of treason and murder.

While a major theme of Turn Coat is how to separate justice from the law, the book, as Butcher put it, is not about “philosophical discussion.” Instead, Butcher said, “There’s lots of explosions and monsters. The special-effects budget is pretty high.”