Book review: Out Law, by Jim Butcher

A small favor

Jun 08, 2026

As noted last time, we generally doing bother reviewing a big name author like Jim Butcher. But we’re almost on the summer hiatus (don’t worry, more content will be inbound) and I’m at the point where I’m reviewing everything. In retrospect, I should have reviewed the last two Sharpe novels, too.

Out Law takes place a few weeks or months after Twelve Months. And Twelve Months addressed almost every thread left dangling by the large book that was Peace Talks and Battleground.

However, there was one more thread dangling out there: Marcone.

At the end of the day, there’s always freaking Marcone.

Buy Out Law

The Story

Chicago “Baron” / mobster Marcone believes that Harry Dresden owes him a favor. And Dresden doing small favors has never come back to bite him in the behind before.

In this case, it seems innocuous enough. One of Marcone’s thugs in a suit wants to go straight. Help him go straight.

Then Harry finds himself battling a bookie with demonic power, and worst of all … the IRS. The worst part is that at least one of these threats was created by Dresden himself.

Out Law is tagged as a “novella,” even though it’s 200 pages. This may be a novella only by Butcher’s standards in that it’s not the size of a Wheel of Time tome. But it has all of the hallmarks of a full Harry Dresden novel. It has the same pacing, it just doesn’t have ten problems trying to kill Dresden all at once—only two. For Harry, this is what a “simple” job looks like. There’s only one potential world-ending threat.

Of course, this has all the hallmarks of Jim Butcher smartass. Two of our antagonists are named Emilio and Estevez—given Butcher’s usually commentary on his work, I wonder which Emilio Estevez film traumatized him more, Young Guns or The Mighty Ducks.

At the end of the day, this wraps up the Marcone threads from Battleground and ends up being a fun little novel.

Surprisingly enough, there is also additional blowback from Changes.

The Characters

There is a lot of character in this one, perhaps as a leftover from how much character development everyone had to go through in Twelve Months. Harry is forced to work with a lowlife who has been an antagonist, and trying to go straight. The lowlife in question is comedically inept about how the noncriminal world works.

And Jim Butcher has done the impossible: he made a lawyer and an IRS agent look like real people. I’d go into more detail, but that would be spoilery.

The World

This is Harry Dresden’s world, and after 18 novels and two anthologies, Jim Butcher has it pretty well fleshed out. Funny enough, Butcher gets to negotiate his secret history world with more real world issues—Chicago government and the IRS to be precise.