Tag Archives: Starter Villain

In a dog-eat-dog world…be a #BookFace.

How can you be a successful villain, with no experience and no one to train you? You just have to depend on your talking spy cats and unionized dolphins to help you learn the ropes. And trust that they aren’t planning to stab you in the back. It’s all in a day’s work for a Starter Villain.

After being laid off from his job as a reporter at a Chicago newspaper, Charlie moved back into his childhood home to care for his ailing father, and lives there now after his father’s death.

He is trying to secure a bank loan to purchase a local pub when his plans are derailed by his billionaire Uncle Jake passing away and leaving Charlie his business, the third-largest chain of parking structures in North America. Good news, right? With this windfall, Charlie can finally realize his dream of owning the pub.

But, things aren’t what them seem. It turns out the parking garages are actually a front for his uncle’s real business. He is a supervillain, complete with James Bond-style over the top enemies and a volcano island lair. Charlie must learn to navigate this new-to-him underworld, surviving elaborate plots to take him out and steal his uncle’s empire. It’s a wild, imaginative ride with great characters and clever world-building, full of sarcastic humor and insightful storytelling.

Starter Villain is another fun novel by one of my favorite authors, John Scalzi. Like one of his previous books, The Kaiju Preservation Society, it was written during the height of COVID-19 pandemic, when we all needed something to get us through the days. Escapist fiction at its finest.

“In this clever, fast-paced thriller, Hugo Award winner subverts classic supervillain tropes with equal measures of tongue-in-cheek humor and common sense… The result is a breezy and highly entertaining genre send-up.”

― Publishers Weekly

Love this #BookFace & reading? We suggest checking out all the titles available in our Book Club collection, permanent collection, and Nebraska OverDrive Libraries. Check out our past #BookFaceFriday photos on the Nebraska Library Commission’s Facebook page!

Scalzi, John. Starter Villain. Tor Books, 2023.