Dead Beat

Dead Beat is a novel by Jim Butcher, published in 2005 and the seventh book of The Dresden Files. Its central character, Harry Dresden, is a wizard working in Chicago.

The book opens with Harry adjusting to a new roommate, his vampire half-brother Thomas, and it does not take long for something worse to arrive. One of his vampire foes summons him and threatens his friend, the police lieutenant Karrin Murphy.

The demand is that Harry find the Word of Kemmler. He does not know what the Word is, and while he is trying to find out he also has to work out what damage the person asking for it would be able to do with it. He has three days to find it, which is the shape of the whole book.

The story begins three days before Halloween and nearly a year after the events of the previous novel, and the search puts him in the path of a spell and a set of necromancers, which is how a missing object turns into one of the busiest days of his working life.