Books in which the villain is actually the hero

It’s impossible to write a “villain is actually the hero” book list without mentioning asexual darling Victor. In college, Victor and Eli were simply brilliant roommates researching how to develop extraordinary abilities through near-death experiences. Ten years later, Eli is a celebrated hero, celebrated for killing anyone with extraordinary abilities he can find, and Victor is a recently escaped villain whose only goal is to take Eli down. Across two timelines, their complicated relationship with their sense of justice reveals that the real villain was the hero all along.

In the human kingdom, shapeshifters like Fia are rare. When the war between the fae and humans ended, the fae retreated to Tír na nÓg and stole the High Queen’s daughter, leaving Fia in her place. Raised as the Queen’s spy, her affinity for plants became a perfect poison against the evil fae. So when the Queen tells her she must go through the Gate to get her stolen daughter back, Fia says yes, even though she is accompanied by her first boyfriend, her lover, and the man who broke her heart. When they go to Tír na nÓg for one night once a month to get the princess back, Fia discovers that the evil fae may not be as evil as she was led to believe.

All her life, Isolde has been told that even among the evil vampires, there is no one as malicious as Adrian, the Vampire King. At the end of a difficult conflict, the only way to save her people is to marry Adrian. Isolde plans to kill him while she can, but when her wedding night assassination attempt fails, she begins to uncover the truth behind the Vampire Court. When the evil of her home kingdom and the benevolence of the Vampire Court are revealed, Isolde must reorient her goals to stay on the right side.

Zetian lives in a world where teenagers, linked to girls via psychic links to pilot robot suits, fight aliens. She desperately wants to be chosen for the program – not to save the world, but to avenge her sister’s death. When she is finally chosen, she unexpectedly overpowers and kills the pilot responsible for her sister’s death. She’s gotten her revenge, but now she must face what comes next. Zetian is too powerful to imprison, but to get her under control, they pair her with the strongest male pilot, and she’ll have to work that much harder to survive their partnership.