Ordinary Day

I find that indeed, the writing is very consistent and everything makes sense; Jim's worldbuilding is strong, and his later books follow up nicely on the older ones.

There's quite a lot of depth that you get about Harry over the course of the story, some of which you'll have the basic gist of from the show, but there's more to be had as well. Harry's ability to handle the continuing crises that get flung his way is a nice little side note in some of the later books.

Re: the other characters, I find that they get their share of character development as well, with the caveat that since the series is written in first person and is exclusively Harry's POV, you never actually get into anyone else's heads. But you do see Harry's perception of various characters changing in interesting ways.

What I like the most about the books: Jim's creative ability to come up with the damndest ways for Harry to solve a problem and to make funny, snarky commentary while he's doing it. The big climactic battle at the tail end in Dead Beat had been laughing out loud because it was just so beautifully done and so very Harry.

What I like the least: that's a harder call since there's a whole lot to like here, and I very rarely find myself quibbling with any of it. About the only thing that comes to mind off the top of my head is that every so often Jim will wing you an offhanded reference to what sounds like a helluvan interesting bit of character interaction--only it's backstory and the reader never actually sees it.

For example--and this isn't really a spoiler, so I'll go ahead and mention it--in the very first book Harry tells the reader that he and Susan, who already have a relationship underway as of the beginning of the story, experienced a "soulgaze" (this is a phenomenon that hasn't actually shown up on the show yet, and involves it being dangerous to look into a wizard's eyes since that wizard will see every aspect of your soul--and it's a two-way thing, too). I would really have loved to have seen that on camera, since I never really got much into Susan as a character and it would have been interesting to see in her what Harry does, which is not explored to my satisfaction.