GHOST STORY recap?

Spoiler

Dresden is dead. He's in some sort of in-between world - between the mortal living world and the true afterlife (whatever that is - it is a big unknown even in the in-between). It turns out that the in-between world can be home to all sorts of nasty things like hostile ghosts. Some in-between spirits choose to stay there and do what they can to help protect the mortal world. Many of them are former cops, and their boss is Murphy's dad. Murphy's dad gives Harry a choice - go on to what comes next, or go back to the mortal world as a spirit and find out who killed him. But, he warns that if he doesn't go back, 3 of Harry's friends will be hurt. Furthermore, if Harry does go back he runs the risk of being double-killed as a ghost, in which case he'll be lost forever.

Harry, of course, goes back. As a ghost, he has no magic and will dissipate if he is exposed at sunrise.

Also it is 6 months after he died.

Since he's a ghost, he visits and recruits Mort. Turns out there are a lot of bad ghosts roaming about and Mort is fighting them with good ghosts. The big bads in charge of the evil ghosts are The Corpsetaker - who died but is still a ghost and can posess people - and Evil Bob - the part of Bob that Harry made him toss away after that whole Kemmler deal. Harry and Mort go visit the rest of the good guys - Murphy, Butters, Bob, Daniel Carpenter and Billy. They all agree that Harry is not an evil illusion, but they also think (and so does Harry) that he could just be a spirit-copy sort of thing, not the real Harry in ghost form. Molly shows up and is really bonkers.

Ongoing plot points and stuff throughout:

1 - Harry gets to see that Chicago is getting attacked by frog monsters now that Harry is gone from defending it. The good guys team is having to make a lot of choices they don't like, such as working with Marcone. Everyone is very tense, especially Murphy (the defacto leader of the gang).

2 - Molly is acting loopy, and going around killing magical thugs who are hurting innocents. She has created a personality of The Rag Lady to try and instill fear in would-be-Chicago-attackers like Harry's presence did. It turns out that Molly is being trained by Harry's fairy godmother Leah, and both are taking turns acting as the Rag Lady. Leah's training of Molly is much more brutal than Harry's was, but is also resulting in Molly being much more capable in combat. Still, Molly's sanity seems to be slipping a bit. Harry eventually re-discovers that he had ordered his own death from Kincaid in fear that he would become a monster working for Mab, and in addition to the other things Molly is having extreme guilt problems from erasing Harry's memory after he ordered the kill. By the end of the book, Molly seems a bit better but still not necessarily great.

3 - The good guys take on Corpsetaker and Evil Bob and win.

4 - Some bad magic guy is brutally running a gang of kids. Harry and the good guys help out the kids.

Harry has some dealings with Uriel throughout. At the conclusion, it is revealed that agents of hell whispered 7 words to Dresden just before he decided to kill himself. Whether Dresden would still have done it or not, it removed his free will. Uriel can't undo what happened, but can intervene himself to counter it. Murphy's dad in the in-between works for Uriel, though he claims the "3 of your friends will get hurt" bit was just a random guess, nothing more, giving Uriel plausible deniability of his involvement.

At the end, Uriel takes Dresden back to the door in the in-between which leads to whatever is next. Dresden goes through, and wakes up on Demonreach, alive, having been resussitated by Mab and Demonreach. Mab proclaims her ownership of him, and Uriel whispers 7 words to Dresden that make him realize he can be his own man while working for Mab.

Malazan Empire: GHOST STORY recap? - Malazan Empire