Jim Butcher

Jim Butcher is an American author best known for The Dresden Files, a long-running urban fantasy series following Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard-for-hire, as he investigates supernatural crimes for both paying clients and the city police. Beginning with Storm Front in 2000, the series has grown to more than a dozen novels blending noir detective fiction with modern-day magic, vampires, faeries and a richly built supernatural underworld, and helped establish many of the conventions that later defined the wider urban fantasy genre. A short-lived television adaptation, The Dresden Files, aired on the Sci-Fi Channel in 2007. Butcher is also known for the Codex Alera series, an epic fantasy blending Roman-inspired culture with elemental magic, and more recently for The Cinder Spires, a steampunk fantasy series. New readers should start with Storm Front, since The Dresden Files is heavily serialized and rewards reading in order as Harry's world and enemies deepen across the series. Butcher's combination of hardboiled narration and inventive magic systems has made him one of the genre's most enduringly popular authors.