Susan Rodriguez

Spoiler-light through her introduction at McAnally's and the chapter-17 date. The full-spoiler arc section at the bottom covers what happens to her during the climax.

---

In a sentence

A reporter for the Arcane tabloid who has been chasing Harry Dresden for an interview for weeks, who finally corners him on the night the case is breaking, and who is much more than the breathless ghost-story journalist she initially plays at being.

Who she is in the story

Susan covers the paranormal beat for a Chicago tabloid that mostly publishes Bigfoot sightings and crop circles. She is genuinely good at her job — better than the Arcane's reputation suggests, and significantly more skeptical and methodical than the byline makes her look. She has been writing about Harry on and off for a while and has been trying to get him on the record for an interview the entire time. He has been politely deflecting her.

In chapter eleven she finally catches him at McAnally's pub, leans into the table with her notebook out, and gets him to agree to dinner. The dinner is in chapter seventeen. She arrives at Harry's apartment with a bottle of wine, dosed unknowingly with a love potion that Bob brewed earlier and Susan picked up by accident, and the date does not become an interview. The demon Kalshazzak attacks Harry's front door before the night gets any further. From there she is part of the case whether either of them wants it or not.

She is, importantly, not a damsel. She handles the demon scene with more poise than most of Harry's allies handle their own scenes. She is taken later, in chapter twenty-two, because the antagonist correctly identifies her as someone Harry will move heaven and earth to recover.

What she's like

Quick, urbane, fearless. She uses charm and humor as crowbars and they work because they are also genuine. She does not back off a question because it makes the source uncomfortable. She does back off when the source is being honest, which is rarer than she expected.

The book treats her as Harry's intellectual equal in a way the genre's conventions do not require. She reads rooms faster than he does. She asks better follow-up questions than Murphy. She knows when she is being managed and is willing to call it out. She is also, in this book, in over her head — not because she is incapable, but because the dose of the case she has signed up for is several times what she thought she was getting.

What she wants

The story. The real one. Not the Arcane version. Long-term, a career past the tabloid — Storm Front hints she is using the paranormal beat as a calculated move on the assumption that something real will eventually break and she will be the only Chicago reporter positioned to cover it accurately. The case Harry is working is, in her professional judgment, exactly that break.

What she fears / hides

Less than most characters in this book. She tells Harry early that she is not afraid of what she has been covering, and the book proves her largely right — she does not panic at the demon, at the ritual, or at the storm. What she does not say out loud is that the date in chapter seventeen was not entirely a date and not entirely an interview; she was hoping for both, and the love potion accident genuinely scrambles her ability to tell the difference for several scenes.

Key relationships

• Harry Dresden — pursuit-turned-date-turned-much-more-complicated. He likes her. He is afraid of liking her. By the end of the book the case has made the relationship a real one whether he was ready or not.
• The Arcane — her employer. She regards them with affectionate contempt and uses their byline for access she could not get otherwise.
• Victor Sells — never knowingly. He sees her as a battery — a sympathetic link to Harry plus the kind of intimate energy his ritual needs. The book makes the threat real without making her the threat's object.

What she looks like

Late twenties, Latina, with sleek shoulder-length dark hair that catches lamp-amber in a tavern and lightning-blue at a doorway, warm brown eyes that miss very little, expressive arched eyebrows, and a smart-knowing smirk that is permanently her default expression at 70% strength. She dresses with reporter-chic deliberation — a fitted blazer over a silk blouse, a fitted skirt or slacks, smart low heels that make a clean decisive sound on a hardwood floor — and she carries the working tools of her profession with her at all times: spiral notebook, pen, microcassette recorder, shoulder camera-bag, a small umbrella beaded with rain. By the late chapters her polish is rumpled by what has happened to her, in ways the prose marks with clear, careful sympathy.

For your book club

• Susan is set up as an interview obstacle in chapter one and an actual character by chapter eleven. Does the book earn the upgrade, or does it leverage genre romance conventions to do it cheaply?
• The love-potion accident in chapter seventeen has consequences past comic relief. Butcher uses comedy to set up real consent questions and then asks the reader to take them seriously. Does that work?
• Susan handles the demon at the door better than Harry does, briefly. Where else does the book quietly position her as the more competent half of the room, and what does Harry do with that information?
• She is taken in the third act because the antagonist sees her clearly. What does that say about Harry's professional opsec? About his choices in the relationship?
• The series-long arc that begins here will eventually reshape Susan's life in ways Storm Front only hints at. Looking back at this book, what does the novel get right about her — and what does it set up that it does not yet pay off?

Aliases

The following names and references in the book all point to this character. Use any of these as link anchors back to this page.

• Susan Rodriguez (canonical — the most common form)
• Miss Rodriguez
• Susan
• Rodriguez

---

Full-book spoilers

Stop here if you are still reading.

Susan's third-act arc is the most quietly upsetting thread in the book. After the demon attack and a rough recovery, she pursues Harry in chapter twenty-one with the Arcane's ThreeEye sample in her hand. Harry refuses to give her the case. She doses herself with ThreeEye instead, because she is a reporter and the drug temporarily grants wizard sight, and she wants to see. Victor uses the moment she becomes magically sensitive to enthrall her into his ritual circle at the lake house. She spends chapter twenty-four in his loft, dosed, glassy-eyed, intermittently lucid, and is the sympathetic battery for the working he tries to use to kill Harry at point-blank range. Harry pulls her out of the circle in chapter twenty-five by breaking Victor's containment and burning the house. She survives. The closing chapter has her at his bedside, fully herself again, the recorder pointedly not running. The series will return to this scene many times.