Once when the forum was younger iposited a connection between the first half and second half of the case files. At the time we'd just had Skin Game come out and the similarities were astounding.

Books 1 and 11: Harry Dresden fights an evil wizard doing black magic.
Books 2 and 12: Harry Dresden takes on a dark mantle to fight above his weight class.
Books 3 and 13: Harry Dresden mucks about with his own death to fight a super ghost.
Books 4 and 14: Harry Dresden fights a crazy fairy princess.
Books 5 and 15: Nicodemus tries to steal a holy relic connected to Christ.

So... How does my prediction, that we'd get more from Laura and Mavra, pan out for Book 16?

Quite well if you count Battle Ground as part 2 of Peace Talks!

So what of Book 17 (Twelve Months?)? Jim says it still deal with the fallout from BG... So my prediction?

After a traumatic White Council loss, Harry faces off against Cowl and other necromancers. It's practically set up for us: this time, instead of an offscreen ghoul attack, it's the Black Court skirmish from BG (complete with vampire Chandler). And the Black Court are necromancers, apparently!

So far so good! (Though I wonder what happened to the wrestling book...)

I spent this last week rereading Proven Guilty, and I think I have most of the answer.

For the record, I think we must accept Harry's final conclusions at the end of the novel, as it would be a very unusual casefile if Harry didn't solve it by the end. So, the main plot is as follows:

• Molly comes into her magic.
• Sandra Marling primes Molly to use fear magic to cure Nelson and Rose of their addiction.
• In doing so, Molly and her victims become fear anchors for a Fetch sending spell.
• Darby Crane is invited to Splattercon!!! as a guest and a patsy.
• The main villain sends the fetches from the Nevernever to the anchors.
• When Harry attempts to send the fetches back to the summoner, they get sent back to the fear anchor instead, because they were sent, not summoned.
• The Greater Fetches bring Molly to Arctis Tor for reasons.
• Eldest Fetch goes to leave an incriminating corpse, Darby, as the summoner.
• Harry accidentally rescues Darby from being the patsy.
• Harry et al. rescue Molly from Arctis Tor.

There are still questions. And, upon rereading, I find the "Sandra=Maeve=main villain" theory to be surprisingly plausible. At the very least, Sandra is working towards the same purposes as Maeve. It is Sandra who gives Molly the idea to use fear magic. As the convention chair, she is well-positioned to invite Darby Crane to SplatterCon!!! I find Sandra working for Maeve to be more plausible, given how deep her cover is (runs a shelter and a convention, has been helping Molly and friends for months).

Maeve is the main villain of Proven Guilty. We can narrow the Fetch Sender down to two individuals, Mab or Maeve. (One can assume that Mother Winter remains too uninvolved to bother being the sender.)

"There are things strong enough to send them through from the [Nevernever]? I didn't think that ever happened anymore. Hence the popularity of working through mortal summoners."

"Oh, it's doable," Bob assured me. "It just takes a hell of a lot more juice to open the way to the mortal world from the other side."

I frowned. "How much power are we talking?"

"Big," Bob assured me. "Like the Erlking, or an archangel, or one of the old gods."

I got a shivery feeling in my stomach. "A Faerie Queen?"

"Oh, sure. I guess so." He frowned. "You think this is Faerie work?"

"Something is definitely screwy in elfland," I said.

"Specifically, [fetches are] creatures of deepest, darkest Winter.

We know that Lily's plan in the climax of the novel was for Harry to use Summer fire to draw Winter forces from the border so that Summer could assist the White Council in their war against the Red Court. We know that Lily and Maeve are working together, as Maeve traps the Winter forces in a time dilation spell. We also know that Maeve has been subverted by Nemesis, because she is by this point advancing her lie that Mab has gone insane.

It is pretty clear that Nemesis has Maeve pulling the strings here. Pulling back Winter's forces from the Gates advances Nemesis's goals. Maeve is clearly playing Lily and Harry here. I can only therefore conclude that she is playing Eldest Fetch, as well. That was the goal, to weaken the Gates' defenses.

I stuck my left hand out to one side of me and said, "Look over here." Then I mimed a short jab with my right fist.

"It's a rope-a-dope," Murphy said, her eyes narrowing. "A distraction. But from what?"

This theory, that Maeve is pulling the strings, and that Sandra Marling, Lily, and Eldest Fetch are all her cats-paws, explains much of the plot.* It in fact leaves us with three main mysteries.

1. Who hit Harry on his way home from the warlock execution, and why didn't his attacker want to kill him?
2. Who fixed Little Chicago?
3. Why Molly?

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WHO HIT HARRY?

First of all, we can discount Ace. I mean, maybe he's just an amateur, but it's also possible the accident was just a delaying tactic.

"You sure it was deliberate?"

"Yeah, but whoever it was, he wasn't a pro."

"Why do you say that?"

"If he had been, he'd have spun me easy. No idea he was there until he'd hit me. Could have bumped me into a spin before I could have straightened out. Flipped my car a few times. Killed me pretty good."

This novel discusses time travel an awful lot. In fact, I'm pretty sure it discusses time travel more than Cold Days, where the plot clearly relied on the temporal shenanigans it mentioned (the Demonreach explosion blasting backwards in time). And then, there's no explicit time travel in the climax.

There's implicit time travel with the note that Rashid sends Harry to kick off the plot. Except the plot kicks off just fine when Molly calls him. So why send Harry the note? Bob explains this best:

"OK," I said. "So what's the point in sending the message at all, if it can't change anything?"

"Oh, it can," Bob said. "If it's done subtly enough, indirectly enough, you can get all kinds of things changed. Like, for example, he tells you that your car is going to be stolen. So you move it to a parking garage, where instead of getting stolen by the junkie who was going to shoot you and take the car on the street, you get jacked by a professional who takes the car without hurting you-- because by slightly altering the fate of the car, he indirectly alters yours."

Rashid, by the note, is priming Harry to look for black magic. Without that priming, Molly would have died. (Harry admits he didn't even notice the tampering with Rose, and almost didn't notice Nelson's. Without being told to look for black magic, would Harry have ever seen it?) Rashid also interferes at the trial, stalling until the cavalry arrives.

Rashid saved Molly's life by sending Harry a note. A future without Lady Molly must be bleak for the Reality Defense Force, indeed.

There's another time traveler in the tale, and I suspect he's working with Thomas. It seems suspicious that Thomas is tailing Harry on this one adventure. But there's something I noticed once Thomas joins the plot: he does his best to remain uninvolved.

I glanced at Thomas, who was facing away, a little apart from the rest of us, staying out of the decision-making process.

There are other instances where Thomas basically wallflowers. He's very careful not to disrupt the natural flow of the case as much as he can help it. I think, like Rashid, Thomas has future information.**

Hitting Harry keeps him out of the apartment. I posit that Future Harry is at the periphery in Proven Guilty, and whenever Harry is out of the apartment, Future Harry is using it as his base of operations. Future Harry has Thomas as a knowing accomplice.***

[ALTERNATIVELY: Listen. Harry Dresden is unstuck in time.]

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LITTLE CHICAGO

Given all of the above, Future Harry and possibly his spirit daughter fixed Little Chicago. There is actually plenty of time in which to do so, as Thomas moves out right before Harry stuffs Bob into his bag for half the book. This covers the night Darby attacks Harry, Rawlins, and Mouse and the fetches kidnap Molly. It's a bit Azkaban as Future Harry knows he can do it because it has already been done.

-----

WHY MOLLY?

This is difficult to guess, and can seemingly only be explained by assuming Maeve knows more than she should. Either Maeve knows that Molly is Harry's best friend's daughter and a mortal practitioner coming into her talent, or it is an amazing coincidence that her plan hinges on. We know Arctis Tor was attacked by a rogue Denarian. We suspect this rogue Denarian was a Nemesis agent with a Coin. It's plausible to posit that Maeve and Nemesis sent another agent, the rogue Denarian, to clear out Arctis Tor, leaving the Wellspring unguarded why Mab was curing the Leanansidhe. And through Lea and the Denarian, it's possible Nemesis knows about Michael. But what about his family?

Gregor. Molly was targeted as Charity's daughter, and not as Michael's. We know she has Fae in her ancestry, and that this is likely the source of her and her daughter's talents. I posit that Charity is Aurora's descendant. Future Harry, by the way, isn't the only player operating on the periphery. Someone else is in town.

The sun had risen on our way there, though heavy cloud cover and grumbling thunder promised unusually bad weather for so early in the day. That shouldn't have surprised me either. When the Queens of Faerie were moving around backstage, the weather quite often seemed to reflect their presence.

We see this again in Small Favor and Ghost Story, where particularly frigid weather means that Mab is in the area. So, let's check out the opening to Proven Guilty's second chapter:

I turned my back on them and walked out of the warehouse into Chicago's best impression of Miami. July in the Midwest is rarely less than sultry, but this year had been especially intense when it came to summer heat, and it had rained frequently.

What the hell is Titania doing in Chicago? Combining this with Mab's assertion that Molly would be a better fit for Summer and the symmetry of a Winter scion becoming the Summer Lady while a Summer scion becomes the Winter Lady, and it's not unreasonable to conclude that Molly's Fae ancestry stretches to Titania.

But that doesn't answer what Titania's goal is. Fix and Lily aren't working towards it. They're working towards Maeve's goals. It would be a stretch for Titania to be infected with Nemesis, wouldn't it?

I suspect that Titania was trying to groom Molly to be Lily's successor, subtly, in the background. Maybe by nudging the right books into Molly's hands. I suspect that Winter's Queens knew this and were keeping tabs on Molly for that reason. And when the pump was primed, Maeve chose Molly to use as a fear anchor.

This is the wildest-assed guess, but I think it holds up.

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* Note that Eldest Fetch need not be infected with Nemesis. The two main symptoms pointed out by fans, his magic immunity and his more-than-a-simple-glamour shapeshifting are both explained away within the text.

I should have kept in mind how easily the Scarecrow had shed my magic the night before. The lesser fetch must have had some measure of the same talent, because it changed the tone of its howl in the middle of its leap, impacted my shield, and oozed through it as though the solid barrier was a thick sludge.

This thing was no fetch, no changer of form and image and illusion. There was no shadowy mask over an amorphous form, no glamour altering its appearance, which my salve had enabled me to see through. This thing was a whole, independent creature. Unless maybe it was a fetch so old and strong that it could transform itself into the Scarecrow in truth and not simply in seeming.

** Unless that's how Thomas always is and I've never noticed.

*** It's worth noting that I suspect Thomas is lying about Glau being a djinn scion. My only evidence is that Glau is a dead ringer for the Innsmouth look. I think Thomas was told to not draw Harry's attention to the Fomor because timey-wimey-wibble-wobble.