Storm Front

Storm Front is a 2000 urban fantasy novel by Jim Butcher and the first book in The Dresden Files, his first published series. It introduces Harry Dresden, a professional wizard working in Chicago, whose practice is less lucrative than his reputation suggests.

The plot is a case rather than a quest. Dresden accepts a job from a woman named Monica Sells, whose husband Victor has become erratic and paranoid and obsessed with the occult, and shortly afterwards he is called to consult on a double murder committed with magic. That pairing of a domestic problem with a criminal investigation is the structure the series keeps to.

The novel was later adapted into a pilot for a television channel, though Butcher has said the writers were not attempting to recreate the book on a chapter-by-chapter or even story-by-story basis. Butcher writes the case as a procedural with magic in the evidence chain, and the first-person narration keeps the reader's knowledge level with Dresden's, which is not high. The wizard's obligations to the supernatural community are the other running problem, since the favours he owes come due at the worst possible moments.