The Devil You Know

Read Mike Carey's Felix Castor series for something just like Dresden in style and form, yet completely different. The blurb states it's 'every bit as good as Jim Butcher' and this is no exaggeration. It is just as good and arguably better. Every character is complex, nothing is as it seems, the world is dark and dreary. The Caster series really does hearken back to those classic detective noir novels, but merged with fantasy. It's a good combination that absolutely works.Pound for pound, I would argue as close as you are going to get to The Dresden Files without being a complete rip-off. You've got the hard-boiled detective noir thriller story merged with the supernatural. The hero is a freelance exorcist (not a wizard) in the vein of Harry Dresden though with a much lower power level. The world created is a world completely haunted by ghosts, a world divided between who can see these hauntings and those who cannot. The appearance of the restless dead has change the world...and created new opportunities.Exorcists, you see, are the front line defense against the world of the dead. And our broke, downtrodden hero, Felix Caster, is one of the best.As a whole, the Felix Caster books are a bit slower paced than Dresden with a bit more of the whole 'detective whodunit' thing going on in every book, but it does deliver the goods. The Alex Verus books are more directly comparable to Dresden than Felix Caster, but Felix Caster is definitely up there while still having it's own personality.