It appears to me that it, in fact, it almost did let Nemesis find it's happy space.

Do you mean by almost releasing nemfected Lea?  I don't think Mab would have allowed that to happen.

Dunno, man.

This quote seems to imply that the Ladies have out-smarted Mab on the "cunning manipulations" front.  Freaking MAB.

I'm not buying that.

Of course... given that Mab was apparently right there all along, hidden beside Lea, it's equally possible that the plan went off mostly as the Maeve&Lily wanted it to... which was, in most regards, ALSO mostly as Mab wanted it to.

You are both right and wrong at the same time.  The Ladies did not out-smart Mab.  In fact, you could say THEY didn't do anything, the Adversary did.  Poor Lily thought she was a becoming a real power player, when in fact she was just an easily manipulated puppet.  Maeve was pulling her strings and Maeve in turn was run by the Adversary.  Maeve's entire motivation was to screw over her Mom for past grievances, so she went along with the Adversary's plan.  If it had just been Maeve and Lily working together on their own I doubt they would have been much of a challenge for Mab to outmaneuver.   

I think it's only in Cold Days when Maeve put her own spin on the Adversary's orders by killing Lily in order to both remove her possible replacement and take Sarissa away from Mab.

I've only commented in the early pages of this thread.  Has anyone thought of a counter argument to both the OP and the idea Karin Murphy will be completely sidelined because she will probably have a major role; perhaps the major role, to play in getting Harry out of his gig as the Winter Knight?  Before they went into the old meatpacking factory to meet Nicodemus, Murphy told Harry that she didn't believe there wasn't anyway other than death to get out of being the Winter Knight.  So that raises the question of how Harry could do that.

After Harry flash froze then blasted apart the Sidhe noble who gave him some lip at his birthday party at Arctis Tor, Mab commented, "No one has lifted a hand to them that way since the days of Tam Lin."  So who is this Tam Lin guy?  The wiki page about Tam Lin is somewhat sparse, but he has dealings with Mab; who sometimes is called Maeve and other odd spellings.  Eventually Tam is going to be sacrificed by the sidhe, but he is rescued by a mortal women who hides him; and there's some shapeshifting involved.  The main thing is that Tam is free from Mab and can go about seducing mortal maidens, which seemed to be his regular pastime.

My guess is there is probably more than one story about Tam Lin and Jim will adapt whatever he needs in order to tell his story, but I'd bet dollars to donuts Karin Murphy won't get completely put on the sidelines.

Nanook of the North....

LOL

AKA - will MM world's lasciel also carry a huge grudge against Harry.

How do you know MM Harry won't be carrying her coin?  The way I see it, MM Harry has to be more dangerous than regular Harry.  This doesn't mean MM Harry can cast harder hitting spells, but he has has deadly arcane knowledge that regular Harry lacks.  In fact, knowing how to summon Harry's from alternate universes might be something MM Harry learned from Lasciel.   

It will soon be announced that just as Quentin Tarantino divided Kill Bill into parts 1 & 2, Peace Talks will be released in two parts.  Whether we will have to wait until after the second Cinder Spires book is released for Peace Talks part 2, is an open question. 

Chapter 65!

Cowl may be, or once might have been, a member of the White Council.  For example, one hypothesis is that Cowl is the presumed deceased Senior Council member Simon Petrovich which would explain why I said Cowl might have been a member of the White Council.  If that is the case, or if Cowl is any other presumed dead member of the Council then Harry won't have the opportunity to meet Cowl at a meeting of current White Council members.

We know very little about Kumori other than she was on a quest to defeat death, the time when she had a one on one conversation with Harry, as part of their truce she took off some kind of bracelet or glove (I forget what the item was, I sure someone can find a description in Dead Beat.) and she was working for, and studying necromancy under Cowl.  I believe Kumori studied with Cowl for some time, that she wasn't a recent recruit, because she was quite certain that Cowl had survived many death curses before.  I don't think you don't can gain that kind of certainty unless you've seen it demonstrated repeatedly.  One more thing, the EMT Lamarr said Kumori is white.  He would have seen her hands and probably part of her forearms when she did her holding off death trick with one of Marcone's goons who was shot.
 
Of course one early and persistent hypothesis is that Kumori is in actuality Elaine.  While not unproven I think Elaine is something of a red herring as far as Kumori goes, but even if I am correct, Kumori could be in a similar position vis a vis the White Council as Elaine is.  She might not be a member of the White Council.  Like Elaine, Kumori may have kept her abilities a secret.  In fact I think that's likely or Kumori probably would have been recruited to fight the Red Court.

Harry may presume that Kumori is dead, seeing as Cowl was apparently injured by the Dark Hallow blowing up in his face and Cowl was probably much stronger than Kumori.   I think Kumori bailed out and opened a way to escape before the backlash occurred, but currently Harry has no reason to suspect that's the case.  Harry was too busy at the time to notice and even Bob presumed Kumori was blasted into atoms. 

So what does that leave us with?  Well, we have an idea of how tall Cowl is.  We know he was badly injured, but the last time Harry saw Cowl was how long ago?  How far back are the events in White Night?  That wizard healing thing means Cowl might not look quite as beat up as he did in the Raith's Deep.  Finally, we know the command word that Cowl used when he threw power at Harry, "Garoosh!"  Harry also got  a feeling for Cowl's magic.  Like Harry's it was touched with darkness, but not blatantly corrupt.  I think those last two items are the most important ones.  If he meets someone he doesn't know is Cowl, Harry should recognize the use of an identical command word and the feeling of Cowl's magic.

With Kumori, I think she made a big mistake allowing Harry to see the item she removed from her hand or wrist .  If Harry sees that item again it should be a huge clue for him.  Of course knowing Harry it will take him half a dozen or more chapters to put two and two together.         

I'm late to this discussion, so if someone has already mentioned this incident, I apologize, but it seems to me there is one time when Harry withholding information has led to someone getting hurt and it's in Storm Front and it's not Linda Randall.

"Don't make me choose, Harry." Her voice softened, if not her eyes or her face. "Please."

I thought about it. I could bring everything to her. That's what she was asking - not half the story, not part of the information. She wanted it all. She wanted all the pieces in front of her so she could puzzle them together and bring the bad guys in. She didn't want to work the puzzle knowing that I was keeping some of the pieces in my pocket.

What could it hurt? Linda Randall had called me earlier that evening. She had planned on coming to me, to talk to me. She was going to give me some information and someone had shut her up before she could.

I saw two problems with telling Murphy that. One, she would start thinking like a cop. It would not be hard to find out that Linda wasn't exactly a high-fidelity piece of equipment. That she had numerous lovers on both sides of the fence. What if she and I were closer than I was admitting? What if I'd used magic to kill her lovers in a fit of jealous rage and then waited for another storm to kill her, too? It sounded plausible, workable, a crime of passion - Murphy had to know that the DA would have a hell of a time proving magic as a murder weapon, but if it had been a gun instead, it would have flown.

The second problem, and the one that worried me a lot more, was that there were already three people dead. And if I hadn't gotten lucky and creative, there would have been two more dead people, back at my apartment. I still didn't know who the bad guy was. Telling Murphy what little more I knew wouldn't give her any helpful information. It would only make her ask more questions, and she wanted answers.

If the voice in the shadows knew that Murphy was heading the investigation to find him, and was on the right track, he would have no qualms about killing her, too. And there was nothing she could do to protect herself against it. She might have been formidable to your average criminal, but all the aikido in the world wouldn't do her any good against a demon.

Then, too, there was the White Council. Men like Morgan and his superiors, secure in their own power, arrogant and considering themselves above the authority of any laws but their own, wouldn't hesitate to remove one police lieutenant who had discovered the secret world of the White Council.

I looked at the bloodstained sheets and thought of Linda's corpse. I thought of Murphy's office, and what it would look like with her sprawled on the floor, her heart torn from her chest, or her throat torn out by some creeping thing from beyond.

"Sorry, Murph," I said. My voice came out in a rasping whisper. "I wish I could help you. I don't know anything useful." I didn't try to look up at her, and I didn't try to hide that I was lying.

So Harry trying to protect Murphy led to her treating him as a suspect.  It led to Murphy searching Harry's office because she didn't have the information she needed and I'm certain you will all remember, it led to Murphy getting stung by Victor Sells ever growing scorpion construct or demon.  (Whatever it was.)

Now it could be argued that Murphy sometimes makes questionable to bad decisions, but I see that more in Fool Moon than in Storm Front.  Murphy's view of supernatural world in Storm Front is like someone looking through a keyhole rather than a nice large window and Harry tries to keep it that way; and though Harry does it mostly to protect Murphy, it backfires instead.