Five Sympathetic Killers by Trevor Wood

Charming, devious, cunning and (of course) beautiful, Lily Kintner is the beating, dark heart of this brilliantly twisty thriller, full of morally dubious characters who probably deserve everything that Lily sends their way. Arguably the most ‘fatale’ of all the femme fatales.

‘Truthfully, I don’t think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended?’

It’s a familiar trope to have your killer only take out bad people but Dexter Morgan is the leader of the pack where vigilante killers are concerned, hunting down other serial killers. The novel’s version of Dexter is a touch darker than the TV one, still mordantly funny but also more of an unapologetic sociopath.

‘Dogs were always a problem. They don’t like me and they quite often disapprove of what I do to their masters, especially since I don’t share the good pieces.’

Surely the most prolific of the sympathetic killers? Estimates vary but the body count appears to be heading towards two hundred. Reacher, like Caine, the wandering hero of the Kung Fu TV series, is another classic taciturn hero, helping those who need him in every town he visits before moving on (leaving the town’s population a little lower than it was).

‘If you step half an inch out of line, I’ll kill you and walk away and I’ll never think about you again and I’ll sleep like a baby the whole rest of my life.’

Lisbeth is another avenging angel, but you can’t question her justification for the many kills she initiates – she’s suffered through a litany of abusive relationships, many of which involved her extended family. Whilst not always directly responsible for the deaths she’s a near genius at leaving her abusers vulnerable to other psychopaths, not least, in a later book in the series, when she nails her brother’s feet to the floor to leave him at the mercy of a murderous motorcycle gang  

‘There is nothing to talk about. I’m just a freak that’s all.’

An unlikely selection given the way Alex gleefully narrates his way through a series of murders, rapes and violent assaults, but it’s not his undoubted charisma that gains your sympathy, it’s the way he’s used as a poster boy for a torture technique, introduced by a totalitarian government desperately wanting to subdue its citizens.

Reduced to a cringing puppet with no free will, a reformed Alex is rolled out for public approbation before being dumped back into a vicious world with his defences removed.

‘They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good.’