One "other" vote for Titania.

I'm picturing her taking a shot at Mab and it doesn't go well.

I like Vadderung. He made a great impression in Changes, but is there any reason to put him on a moral tier above Marcone? His business model is hiring out brutal killers to very bad people.

In Jury Duty, we see his einherjar fighting against Dresden over whether or not to "disappear" an innocent child because she witnessed the killing of a predator who was going to torture her to death.

Re: Lara being empty...

Remember that Thomas's Hunger has always been described as being much stronger than Lara's (or any other WCV's except their father's) -- it's possible that a comfortable margin for her is barely enough to sate his. And the feeding process is probably less than 100% efficient.

LOTR was a masterpiece,  Peace Talks not so much,  yes, LOTR was split into three books but each book felt complete, Peace Talks not so much..

LOTR was a masterpiece. But if I'd waited six years to get Two Towers to see how Frodo and Sam got on with their adventures going to Mordor to destroy the ring, I'd have been screaming bloody murder. They spent their entire book walking in swamps and whining about things.

(Also, LOTR was technically six books published in three volumes. /pedantic nitpick.)

Having the next book already there to pick up makes all the difference -- like how the ends of Changes and Ghost Story appeared to us (reading and then waiting for the next book) as opposed to readers picking up the series now. Peace Talks won't feel nearly as incomplete once we've read Battle Ground. The feeling isn't just that the threads are up in the air, it's that we can't identify what are threads of plot and what are red herrings (or worse, signs of the author having lost the plot) until we've read the second half.

I liked seeing Harry and his friends again. Several scenes landed beautifully -- particularly Maggie.

I didn't like ending the book with most of the threads still up in the air. I'd expected some of that, but it was even worse. Thankfully, this is a temporary objection. In future, I'll be able to read Peace Talks and Battle Ground as two parts of a single novel, without the dangling threads. (I hope.)

Biggest unmet expectation -- I'd been imagining the Peace Talks as a big Unseelie Accord event, where in fact it was really a Chicago event. It was Marcone inviting all of the supernatural players in the Chicago area to discuss the fomor, rather than a world-wide anything. As a result, the talks felt a bit small -- we didn't get a glimpse of a bigger world of major nations we've never even heard of, or know almost nothing about.

In the Dresden's backstory, when he's a child, Justine DuMorne, widely-respected warden of the White Council is an abusive foster parent and teacher who tries to isolate Harry and then put the mind-whammy on him to make him into a starborn thug under DuMorne's control.

That goes wrong when Harry (inexplicably) kills DuMorne and is arrested by the White Council for murder.

Harry's version of events is that Eb is a saintly old man who risks his life to spare Harry, takes him into his home and teaches him the good parts of magic and self-control and makes him the man he is today.

And yet...

That's not what we see when Eb is on-screen, and it's not what we see in how other people react to Eb, and it's especially not what we see in Peace Talks.

Every book where Eb is on-screen, we learn that he's not at all who Harry thought he was. In Summer Knight we learn that the irascible hermit is politically connected enough to swing a Senior Council vote. In Blood Rites we learn that the "magic is not for killing" sensei is actually the White Council's dirty-jobs assassin. In Changes we see him ripping the life out of humans, just shredding the first law and everything he's taught Harry.

And Harry's still isolated -- which we're told in the text is "what abusers do". After years of living with Eb, and years of living after that, he doesn't have a single wizard friend until Luccio drags him into the Wardens and he meets Carlos. That made some sense when we thought Eb was a loner hermit, not so much now that we know he's a political mover and shaker with lots of wizard friends.

What are the big fights about in Peace Talks? Eb wants Harry to cut himself off from Maggie -- to whom he says exactly four words, upon first meeting his great-granddaughter, before disengaging from her completely to have a knock-down-drag-out fight with Harry insisting that he has to send her away.

The other is about the White Court Vamps -- but is that really about protecting Harry from them, or about a predator marking his territory? If Eb does use subtle mind-control magic, he might worry that WCVs would be able to spot it in Harry. Could he have been freaking out about Thomas because he thought Thomas could expose him? (Did he arrange Thomas's death for that reason, and to isolate Harry from both the Whampires and the Svartalves?)

And then there's the cornerhounds... we see Eb getting Harry to do two things which are explicitly Warlock-bad things: using a ring of fire and making direct mental contact with the Outside. We only have Eb's word, in a vague and shifty fashion, that the latter is actually safe for Harry. And the former seemed like an unnecessary risk.

And imagine what that scene looks like to a White Council that's thinking about kicking Harry out, again.

Anyway... if we imagine that Ebenezar McCoy was Peabody's boss and has been trying to isolate and mold Harry into his tool, a lot of these things make sense.

In the Thomas heist, Murphy's role was wheel-person and Harry's backup. When Freydis thought to switch her role to hostage, Murphy had a plan for that -- a semi-suicidal plan, but a successful plan nonetheless.

I'd imagine in Battle Ground, we'll see her in something like a reprise of her role in Cold Days -- driving Harry around the lakefront from battle to battle, having his back as needed.

But, yeah, the death flags have been flying like confetti at a ticker-tape parade. I'd imagine she'll be killed at a suitably dramatic moment in the battle, right after gunning down some fomor mook that's about to take Harry out from behind. (Perhaps Listen? -- I can't remember, did Murphy meet Listen, maybe in Aftermath?)

Good point -- this may be the closest we get to seeing the other side of a Harry Dresden soulgaze.

(The next closest would be the 3-Eye junkie in the police station in Storm Front, but he was really vague except about HWWB.)

If Murphy *does* become a Valkyrie or Enherjar...

Can you imagine her hired out to Lara or Marcone and taking their orders?

(Or would Harry use her share of the diamonds to hire her from Vadderung on a long-term contract? --- That does feel like quite a cheat.)