Wizard Harry Dresden must investigate his own flesh and blood when a series of killings strike Chicago’s magic practitioners in this novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling series. Someone is targeting the members of the city’s supernatural underclass—those who don’t possess enough power to become full-fledged wizards. Some have vanished. Others appear to be victims of suicide. But now the culprit has left a calling card at one of the crime scenes—a message for Harry Dresden.   Harry sets out to find the apparent serial killer, but his investigation turns up evidence pointing to the one suspect he cannot possibly believe guilty: his half-brother, Thomas. To clear his brother’s name, Harry rushes into a supernatural power struggle that renders him outnumbered, outclassed, and dangerously susceptible to temptation.   And Harry knows that if he screws this one up, people will die—and one of them will be his brother... Praise for the Dresden Files “Think Buffy the Vampire Slayer starring Philip Marlowe.”— Entertainment Weekly “Fans of Laurell K. Hamilton and Tanya Huff will love this series.”— Midwest Book Review “Superlative.”— Publishers Weekly (starred review) “One of the most enjoyable marriages of the fantasy and mystery genres on the shelves.”— Cinescape “Butcher...spins an excellent noirish detective yarn in a well-crafted, supernaturally-charged setting. The supporting cast is again fantastic, and Harry’s wit continues to fly in the face of a peril-fraught plot.”— Booklist (starred review) “What’s not to like about this series?...It takes the best elements of urban fantasy, mixes it with some good old-fashioned noir mystery, tosses in a dash of romance and a lot of high-octane action, shakes, stirs, and serves.”— SF Site “A tricky plot complete with against-the-clock pacing, firefights, explosions, and plenty of magic. Longtime series fans as well as newcomers drawn by the SciFi Channel’s TV series based on the novels should find this supernatural mystery a real winner.”— Library Journal “What would you get if you crossed Spenser with Merlin? Probably you would come up with someone very like Harry Dresden, wizard, tough guy and star of [the Dresden Files].”— The Washington Times Jim Butcher is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Dresden Files, the Codex Alera, and the Cinder Spires novels. He lives in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. WHITE NIGHT ALSO BY JIM BUTCHER THE DRESDEN FILES STORM FRONT FOOL MOON GRAVE PERIL SUMMER KNIGHT DEATH MASKS BLOOD RITES DEAD BEAT PROVEN GUILTY THE CODEX ALERA FURIES OF CALDERON ACADEM’S FURY CURSOR’S FURY JIM BUTCHER WHITE NIGHT A NOVEL OF THE DRESDEN FILES A ROC BOOK Acknowledgments Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight Chapter Thirty-Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty-One Chapter Forty-Two Chapter Forty-Three Author’s Note Acknowledgments I owe thanks to the usual crowd for this book, as for all the rest: the inmates at the Beta Foo Asylum, semper criticas. Thank you to my agent, Jenn, and my editor, Anne, and thank you, my angel Shannon. You each help me more than you know—yeah, okay, probably Shannon more than the others. But thank you all. Chapter One Many things are not as they seem: The worst things in life never are. I pulled my battle-scarred, multicolored old Volkswagen Beetle up in front of a run-down Chicago apartment building, not five blocks from my own rented basement apartment. Usually, by the time the cops call me, things are pretty frantic; there’s at least one corpse, several cars, a lot of flashing blue lights, yellow-and-black tape, and members of the press—or at least the promise of the imminent arrival of same. This crime scene was completely quiet. I saw no marked police cars, and only one ambulance, parked, its lights off. A young mother went by, one child in a stroller, the other toddling along holding Mommy’s hand. An elderly man walked a Labrador retriever past my car. No one was standing around and gawking or otherwise doing anything at all out of the ordinary. Odd. A creepy shiver danced over the nape of my neck, even though it was the middle of a sunny May afternoon. Normally, I didn’t start getting wigged out until I’d seen at least one nightmarish thing doing something graphic and murderous. I put it down to the paranoia of advancing age. It isn’