Starter Villain by John Scalzi

This was slight in the way Scalzi's books often are- he has good storytelling instincts but a reluctance to deeply interrogate his premises.

This has a similar premise to Hench, which I panned as 'morally bewildering.' The moral stakes are much clearer here, which made it easier to enjoy. Our hero inherits the family business, which his late uncle explicitly identifies as supervillainy, but the book doesn't expect you to sympathize with the ideology of supervillainy, merely the poor sadsack protagonist who must navigate this murky world and try to figure out where his own lines are drawn and how to make it out alive.

Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer

Continuing on the theme. This was pitched as The Office in a supervillain's fortress, and it mostly fits the brief, albeit laden down with a slow burn romance between the villain and his personal assistant that I could have done without.

Here there is no question that we are supposed to understand the villain as a Robin Hood standing up to an oppressive king, but that supposed to is doing a lot of work. Maehrer seems caught between prongs of her scenario- for Evie's defection to the villain to be a source of angst and happening at risk of communal alienation, the king needs to be popular in her village. For her to have the moral clarity and belief in her mission required to be an effective assistant to the villain, the king needs to be transparently a tyrant. Splitting the middle here doesn't quite land. I kept waiting for the substantive reasons for Evie's rejection of the king's law to become clearer, but probably we are just supposed to read it as the evolving consequences of her growing love for the villain rather than any sort of political awakening.

That said, the handling of the evil office politics is a delight and I particularly enjoyed a baffling set of small details about 'the interns' because Maehrer never explains why a secret lair has interns, just has them be there and causing trouble in the background. This book made me laugh and that's worth a lot.