I literally discovered Butcher by walking into a library, pulling a book out based on nothing but the image on the spine (incidentally it was furies of calderon), flipping to page 3 and reading 2 sentences. Upon deciding that I liked his writing style and being relatively intrigues by the cover I bought the 3 Alera books that were out at the time, followed shortly after by Dresden.

And they say you can't judge a book by its cover.

Well, essentially you would do it by being indirect. If you want to influence someone to do what you want, mind bend his pet instead and make your own lassie that tells him what to do, it might work just out of weirdness.

If you want to kill a guy with magic don't use a gust of wind to knock him off a building, way too direct. Simply arrange an accident. Same way you would physically, if it was obviously unintentional they won't be coming after you... For example, If you magically disconnect a guy's brake cable you might be a murder. If you screw with a cottonmouth's brain and convince it to nest under his car seat on the other hand... Even better would be to introduce a few black widow's to his house, especially if they're local anyway. Magic is really quite unessential at that point, but you could use it if you wanted to...

Of course the easy way would be to just clot a tiny bit of blood in his brain. I don't understand why anyone would use that spectacular heart ripping out thing. Way more convenient if it can be chalked up to one fo the most common causes of death.

For that matter, magically causing cancer should be extremely easy.

Jim should try that one some time, have people mysteriously die from cancer and stroke, normal except for the targets. Like the magical equivalent of Kincaid's kind of methods, except sneakier and even more efficient.