Asshole Victim / Literature

Books with their own pages

• A Song of Ice and Fire

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• 1Q84: The men Aomame assassinates are always abusive men with too much power to separate them from their wives in a less murderous way, or would only continue to harass their ex-wives if left alive.
• Ben Aaronovitch:
  • The unnamed rapist at the end of Rivers of London who discovered his intended victim had a bad case of Vagina Dentata.
  • In the sequel Moon Over Soho the woman, who is now known as "The Pale Lady" racks up another three victims. All of whom were sexual deviants of one kind or another (including a corrupt ex-police officer with a taste for real Catgirls).
• In the Across the Universe (Beth Revis) series, there's Luther. In the first book, he tries to rape Amy, while pretending that he's doing it under the effect of a drug in the water supply (he actually belongs to a small part of the population that is not given the mind-numbing drugs). In the second book, not only does he continue to stalk and try to again rape Amy, but it's revealed that he raped Victorina, just because he was angry that he couldn't rape Amy. Later in the second book, Amy manages to tell Elder all of this. She later finds Luther's body, with the heavy implication that Elder murdered him. Amy swings between being frightened of the idea that Elder killed someone and thinking that Luther seriously deserved it, before throwing the body out of an airlock.
• All the Sinners Bleed:
  • Titus and the police department lose any sympathy for Jeff Spearman after it's discovered he was a serial killer who preyed on children.
  • Latrell deconstructs this trope, as while Titus doesn't feel sympathetic towards him for having kept silent on Jeff and the Last Wolf's crimes, he still knows that as a black man shot by the police his death needs to be viewed objectively.
• Alpha and Omega has Brandon Nesbitt, cohost of a trashy talk show. During his first POV narrative, it is implied that he was involved in a Me Too-related scandal, which cost him his job as a serious journalist. Over the next few chapters, to establish himself as a racist, his internal narration refers to the other cohost, Gabriela, as a "Mexican bitch". Later, when the two are on a trip to Israel in hopes of reviving their respective careers in journalism, he goads Gabriela into arranging to open the Ark of the Covenant. Then, to take her place, he slips her a roofie. With her unconscious, he is tempted to rape her, with his internal narration referring to her as "a cunt that needs fucking", but desists only because he would get caught. When he tries to open the Ark and is struck dead, he clearly had it coming.
• Bilquis in American Gods is one of the first victims of the war between the Old Gods and the New, overlapping with a certain other death trope. But the reader is unlikely to have much sympathy considering she murdered a man in cold blood in her very first scene.
• All of Cody's victims in Angel of Death are criminals, and were killed in the process of committing crimes. In particular, he has stopped at least one rape and at least one mugging. Then again, the narrative doesn't really treat them like they had it coming, only like they're the best option available for Cody because killing them means saving someone else.
• Animorphs:
  • Principal Chapman is a weird example - in the main series, he's a Papa Wolf who's made the ultimate sacrifice for his daughter and is regularly used as a Butt-Monkey in later books. There's no indication in the main plot Chapman has any kind of karmic comeuppance coming. But in the Chronicles prequel books Chapman appears as a dangerous quisling who tries to offer the Yeerks Earth in exchange for his safety. This portrayal of Chapman is a stark contrast to all his other appearances, with the dissonance being so stark some fans have gone so far as to posit that the Chapman of the Chronicles books is a different character with the same name. (It's implied in the novel that the Ellimist returned him to Earth and wiped his memory of his previous encounter with the Yeerks, which may explain this.)
  • Alloran also fits. He firmly believed that the ends justified the means and committed atrocities in the name of stopping the Yeerks, earning the name the Butcher of the Hork-Bajir after releasing a quantum virus on their home planet to kill them all before the Yeerks could infest them. Then he himself was infested and forced to watch, unable to do anything to stop it, as his body was used to murder countless people as well as eat them alive. And he was a herbivore. Jerkass Woobie, indeed.
• The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga: Kestel comments to Blaine at one point that the scandal around him murdering his father Ian McFadden for raping Blaine's sister Mari wasn't the murder itself: Kestel herself was frequently hired to kill adulterous and/or abusive husbands and Make It Look Like an Accident. What pissed people off was Blaine killing Ian out in the open and refusing to deny it. Ian's status as an Asshole Victim is also why King Merrill commutes Blaine's sentence from beheading to transportation to the Penal Colony at Velant. Blaine also muses at one point that most of the other murderers at Velant are people like him who killed one guy who had it coming (when they aren't completely innocent) since the really heinous murderers are usually executed instead of transported.
• In the Detection Club's Official Parody Ask a Policeman, the murder victim is a press baron who (for no better reason than to increase sales) had run campaigns persecuting the police, the government, and the Church. He was a Bad Boss to his staff, too. Consequently there's a wide field of suspects, and none of the detectives asked to investigate feels particularly eager to convict.
• Atlas Shrugged has a train's worth of people brutally killed in an accident based on poor management choices, but not before the author makes sure to mention all about what terrible people they all were.
• In Aunt Dimity: Detective after the bludgeoning death of Prunella Hooper, practically no one in Finch has anything even slightly positive to say about her. The Pym sisters comment that as no one wished to Speak Ill of the Dead at her wake, her son and the vicar were the only ones who said anything at all.
• The Babylon 5 licensed novels often play with this:
  • In Voices, Bester is nearly killed in a terrorist attack. Any sympathy he might have gained (which would probably have been very little, given that he IS Bester) quickly evaporates when he becomes convinced that Talia Winters was responsible based on a thin coincidence (the attack was supposedly carried out by Martian separatists, and Talia's uncle is a Martian separatist.) At the end, the real culprit, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who had hoped to oust Bester and privatize the Psi Corps, is killed by actual Martian separatists, who were pissed off about all the negative attention that the terrorist attack had drawn to their cause.
  • In Blood Oath, Ivanova and Garibaldi are forced to protect G'Kar from mercenaries hired by the pissed-off daughter of a dead rival whose life he had ruined in order to get ahead in his career.
  • In Clark's Law, Earth President Clark orders Sheridan to execute an alien for murdering a human on the station. Sheridan's already hesitant to do it because the alien has suffered severe brain damage as a result of the accident and can't even remember committing the murder. It doesn't help that the human victim was a sex tourist who had a long history of taking advantage of poverty-dwelling aliens in order to indulge his many appalling kinks. He was also doing this while married with two kids. His wife is, needless to say, less than thrilled about the whole mess and ultimately ends up sympathizing with the alien.
• Many of the people the Bastard Operator from Hell antagonizes are not very nice or honest people. In fact, this is exactly why so many of his schemes succeed; people that have substantial skeletons to hide in their closets are much easier to manipulate.
• Dex is the first of the quest to die in Below, by a caustic "jelly" eating into his leg. The others try to show some respect, but nobody liked him—including mild-mannered Tibs, who caused the "accident" by deliberately failing to warn anyone of the approaching jellies. It's implied Dex did something horrific that Tibs was eager to avenge because as others learn of the murder they give Tibs a pass. The protagonist however isn't in the know about the motive, so he (and the reader) can only speculate.
• The Black Spider: One of the victims of the titular monster was the oppressive and greedy Baron von Stoffeln, whose tyrannical antics were indirectly responsible for the spider's creation in the first place. He was mourned by absolutely nobody.
• Black Summoner: The only humans that are killed by Kelvin and his team are thugs, slavers, rapists, and so on. Enemy soldiers who are just following orders are neutralized with non-lethal force.
• In Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds, Li Kao needs to murder someone to carry out a plan, and he hopes to do it to someone who thoroughly deserves it. He finds one in the form of Fainting Maid who set up the deaths of her father's concubine and the soldier she loved solely because she couldn't accept that he preferred another girl over her. When her father learns about this, he's quite happy to leave her to drown in a well.
• The gang of school bullies who make the fatal mistake of trying their usual shenanigans on Lavan, later known as "Lavan Firestorm" for very good reasons in Brightly Burning.
• When Thomas Cromwell has to bring down Anne Boleyn in Bring Up the Bodies, he culls gossip to whip up a case of adultery and treason and settles on lutenist Mark Smeaton^note who he doesn't like but feels sort of bad about executing and the four men who played demons in a play mocking the death of his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey. Two of them are sympathetic figures, the other two less so. Will Brereton flouts the law in his Welsh holdings, getting a friend off for murder (over lawn bowling) and later having a man lynched after being lawfully acquitted of murder. George Boleyn is a Smug Snake who makes his wife Jane's life hell and had tried to drive a fatal wedge between Cromwell and Henry. Cromwell's rationalization was that he needed guilty men, so he chose men who are guilty, just not necessarily as charged.
• Several of Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael mysteries start with the murder of someone hated, and end with the heroes having to catch the killer before it's too late for someone we like.
  • In The Leper of St. Giles, a brutish and cruel nobleman is killed the day before he was to marry a much younger and not-entirely-willing lady. Curiously, but in typically compassionate Ellis Peters form, the mystery is solved with the help of someone who was the victim's friend and who saw him as a good man.
  • In Dead Man's Ransom, Gilbert Prestcote is severely wounded in battle and then murdered in his bed while recovering. In previous books he was set up as a hardline sheriff who was often too quick to judge, resulting in many races against time for Cadfael and Hugh Beringar to save an innocent person from punishment or keep a criminal from getting away. Subverted as while he judged quickly, he wasn't cruel and would always recant if shown evidence he was wrong. He wasn't a Jerkass, just not as good a detective as Cadfael or Hugh.
  • In The Raven in the Foregate, Father Ailnoth's death is mourned by nobody, after the residents and reader spend a few chapters being appalled by his cruelty. In the end, it turns out that his death was not murder, but an accident that the sole witness considered to be divine judgment.
  • The Hermit of Eyton Forest:
    • Drogo Bosiet is a huge brutish man chasing down an escaped villain^note in the medieval sense of "bound servant" and not "bad guy" and beating his groom on the journey. He winds up dead.
    • Then Renaud Bourchier, alias Cuthred, a traitor to his liege who killed Drogo for knowing too much. No one sheds any tears over him when a more loyal knight bumps him off.
  • In Monk's Hood, Gervase Bonel's actions are distinctly lacking in Christian charity, but as pointed out by Cadfael, his actions are entirely legal and proceed from a very strong sense of what is his being his. Such as holding a former villein's son in servage rather than freeing him as he'd hoped, or willing his entire property to the abbey just to spite his stepson over a disagreement.
• In A Brother's Price, a bomb goes off in a theatre where a big part of the royal family are watching a play. While the eldest princesses are implied to be stupid and selfish, they're not evil - but their husband, Keifer, was not only an abusive husband all around, he also has raped and beaten a thirteen-year-old girl (one of his younger wives). The protagonists don't feel sorry for him, and neither does the reader.
• Bruce Coville's Book of...:
  • Bruce Coville's Book of Monsters: In Timor and the Furnace Troll, the story ends with the titular characters devouring Timor's classmates, who are largely a pack of bullies who've been mocking Timor for being a failure as an elf for years.
  • Bruce Coville's Book of Ghosts: Robert Delano Adams in For Love of Him, a drunk, a cheater, and a wife-beater who was ultimately shot by his own wife.
• The Butcher Boy: Played with. Francie sees Phillip Nugent as one, but the reader never actually sees him acting like an asshole. Francie is something of an Unreliable Narrator, has an irrational hatred towards the Nugents and tends to spin all of Phillip's friendliness as smarmy douchebaggery.
  • Played straight with the snobby and judgemental Mrs Nugent.
• Most of the murder victims who get any introduction in Burning Water by Mercedes Lackey. It gets awkward when a pre-murder scene features three children acting and thinking like little monsters, and this scene is instantly followed by the protagonists responding with shock and horror that, you know, three kids have been killed.
• The Business Of Dying has so many, it's difficult where to start.
  • The first is Miriam Fox, an 18-year-old who ran away from home three years ago and became an underage prostitute. It's quickly revealed that she was a pretty nasty girl, to begin with, and made it her business to blackmail people for money. The latter is eventually what got her killed.
  • Then there's the various pedophiles in the story. Nigel Grayley is one of the top-ranked people in the customs department, took part in a huge illegal immigrant business and Grayley has also made a deal with Raymond Keen to get his hands on little girls, pre-teens or young teens, to have sex with and ultimately kill them. Even the protagonist mentions that nobody cared when Grayley committed suicide in jail.
  • Dr Roberts, the child psychologist of Coleman and other houses for wayward children, who also sleeps with several of his underage patients. While he's killed because he let information about Miriam's murder slip to someone else and is only mentioned off-screen to have died, it's difficult to care.
  • And then there's Alan Kover, who appears late in the story, but his background of having once kidnapped a pre-teen girl and raping her in his home, but managing to avoid being convicted of his actions is revealed as the first thing in the book. When he finally does appear and ends up getting burned alive by the protagonist, the reader almost wants to cheer.
  • Finally, Raymond Keen. The owner of a funeral parlor and he has a close business relationship with Mehmet Illan, as part of the illegal immigrant deal along Nigel Grayley and has given Grayley the girls he wanted. He also backstabs people who begin to annoy him or become 'risk factors' in murders he had gotten committed. The protagonist shoots him in the throat and decides to let him suffer, rather than finish him off faster. The reader probably didn't care at this point, glad that he was dead.
• Caging Skies: Johannes Beltzer at the end of the novel. Sure, the man has become a shell of his former self, having fought through Nazi Germany, lived through Communist Germany, had his wealth run into the ground, lost his family in the war and had his Only Friend abandon him, but he's also the same Manipulative Bastard who deceived a helpless Jewish woman into being his intimate partner, wanted to kill his disabled father for being a "hindrance", and was always mean to Karl the cat because he was jealous Elsa liked him more.
• In Caleb Williams, Falkland murders Tyrrel... but the narrator comes down on Falkland's side, as Tyrrel assaulted Falkland at a public meeting, arranged for his (Tyrrel's) cousin to be abducted and forced into marriage, and unjustly evicted some tenants from their home.
• Caliphate:
  • Fudail is Abdul's psychotic son who gang-rapes their family's underage slave girl Petra alongside his friends. Though he is beaten up by his sister Besma and sentenced to 30 lashes to his legs for his crime, he gets off pretty slightly compared to his victim, who is sentenced to become a houri for being raped. Later on, it's revealed that he was killed by his sister for trying to rape her too and even his own father is unsympathetic because he knows his son was a monster.
  • Dr. Meara is the most vile of all the three renegade scientists working for the Caliphate since he is a pedophiliac sociopath who loves to drag little boys on a leash and watch his test subjects die slowly. So when Hamilton captures and subjects him to Cold-Blooded Torture to find out where is the virus, one doesn't feel very sorry for his predicament. At the end, he is later left tied to a chair, one of his victims (a little boy) shows up sharpening a pencil...
• In Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado, Montresor claims he murdered Fortunato because of some unspecified insult which, after numerous injuries, was the straw that broke the camel's back. Yet still, we get no info on any supposed insults, and Montresor is not exactly the most reliable narrator. Though if the narration of the events being told is more accurate than the imagined slight, Fortunato is at the very least a rather obnoxious drunkard and isn't above mocking Montresor for not being a Freemason.
• The Jerome Horwitz Elementary faculty in the Captain Underpants are abusive bullies, who often end up on the receiving end of George and Harold's pranks; given that they go out of their way to make their students' lives a living hell, they well and truly deserve it.
• In Chance And Choices Adventures, the plot is started by the Death by Racism of bandit Hank Butterfield, whose fellow gang members swear vengeance for his death. The second book sees his fellow gang member Gus get killed while on the road to Little Rock.
• Chief Inspector Armand Gamache: Cecile de Poitiers wasn't liked by anybody who had to put up with her, so it comes as no surprise that someone hated her enough to kill her.
• Downplayed in Ramsey Campbell's short story "The Chimney". The narrator's father is quite cruel to his son and does little to hide how embarrassed he is about the narrator's anxiety and timidity. He ultimately dies in a house fire when he stubbornly tries to put it out himself, and while it's ultimately the product of his stubbornness and toxic masculinity, it's treated tragically. The narrator in particular suspects he somehow caused the fire, and is horrified at the notion his resentment towards his father could have been enough to at least subconsciously want him to die.
• Agatha Christie liked to use this trope.
  • And Then There Were None has ten Asshole Victims who each committed a crime, though some of them are portrayed with a degree of sympathy. The murders were committed in order of "guilt", from least to most.
    • Anthony Marston, the first to die, was a reckless driver who ran over a couple of children and was only upset about the incident because it resulted in the loss of his driver's license. He was completely self-centered and showed no remorse or sympathy for his victims. The killer felt that the reckless driver was simply born sociopathic and self-absorbed, and couldn't help not feeling guilty.
    • Many of the other characters, on the other hand, do indeed regret their misdeeds. Interestingly, some of the later killings use the exact opposite logic. For example, the surgeon was drunk, so the deaths he caused under the influence weren't intentional or premeditated and thus considered not as worthy of retribution as say, the nanny who let the child in her charge drown so that her lover would receive the lion's share of an inheritance.
  • A subversion in Five Little Pigs: several characters sided with Caroline Crale when she was convicted of murdering her husband Amyas, a painter having an affair with his model. However, Poirot realises that Amyas was never going to leave Caroline and only kept Elsa around to finish the painting. Elsa killed him and framed Caroline when she learned that he had always intended to stay with his wife.
  • In Murder is Easy, Harry Carter and Tommy Pierce fit this trope. It makes sense that some of the victims would, given that what all the victims had in common was that a particular person was annoyed by them.
  • Ratchett, the victim in Murder on the Orient Express, turns out to be the perpetrator of a truly vile and infamous crime. Upon discovery, several suspects cannot stop themselves from cursing his name, even at the risk of incriminating themselves; Poirot remarks that the victim was so despicable that it'd actually be more suspicious if they didn't.
  • Joyce Reynolds in Hallowe'en Party manages to be a prepubescent version of this trope, being regarded by most of the adults and children around her as a lying Attention Whore and not incredibly well-liked as a result. The fact that she's still a child means that it is not okay when someone bumps her off. Her brother Leopold is also one of these.
  • Some of the deceased in Death Comes as the End fall into this category, especially Nofret and Ipy.
  • Some readers might find the victim, Linnet, from Death on the Nile to be one of these. At the beginning of the book, she seems like quite a nice person until we find out that she's having a village knocked down and the people moved because they're blocking her view (though she is having new houses built for them at least). Then we find out that she stole her best friend's fiancee. She doesn't look quite so good after that. Then another twist when it's shown that the best friend and the fiance were both in on it.
  • Averted in Towards Zero, where the victim is a rather strict and old-fashioned, but very good-natured and kind old lady, liked all around. Her killing is intended as a Moral Event Horizon, though Christie was kind enough to make her terminally ill and actually wanting to die to alleviate reader's guilt. Bonus points for the police discussing the trope and aversion.
  • Interestingly subverted in Evil Under the Sun. While the victim is disruptive in the community and has personality issues, the worst of her actions are being carefully staged by the killer and his accomplice. Poirot has already realised that her addiction to sex/romance/drama makes her vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation, not liable to perform it on others - she's not intelligent enough.
  • Barbara Stranleigh in "The Voice in the Dark" is described as "beautiful, unscrupulous, completely callous, interested solely in herself", and turns out to have been stealing from and abusing her murderer for years.
• The City of Never: Joe Candy is a seemingly unhinged thief who eventually resorts to murdering an innocent woman and tries to kill Daniel's children. He's later consumed by the Emperor of Ashen Rain, and isn't missed by anyone.
• City Primeval: Alvin Guy is a corrupt, power-mad Hanging Judge who exploited his authority to bully everyone around him. Nobody is particularly sad when Clement Mansell murders him, and Cruz is only really angry by the fact that Clement got away with murdering a judge than Alvin's death.
• Clubland Heroes: Peeter Blame was a small-minded, pompous little busybody whose hobby was apparently suing almost everyone he came into contact with, and who seemed to take great pleasure in getting the law imposed as harshly as possible on people for even the mildest of infractions. Subverted, however, in that it is made abundantly clear that being a small-minded and pompous little man isn't an offence punishable by death and his personality does not make it okay for someone to dismissively beat his brains in as if he was an insignificant insect.
• Crime and Punishment's Rodion Rasholnikov kills a greedy moneylender who emotionally (and possibly physically) abuses her mentally disabled sister because he can get the experience of doing something completely immoral whilst actually benefitting the community.
• Used in several Cthulhu Mythos stories, mostly authors other than Lovecraft. The victims in question tend to be selfish jerks, and some are psychopaths. However, since their fates tend to be really, really nasty, the reader may feel bad for them.
  • The "Insects from Shaggai" also qualify as their homeworld was destroyed by another abomination. But considering how evil and debased they were, the species deserved their fate.
  • "Cold Print": Strutt is a smug, rude sexual predator who frequently gropes his landlord's daughter's ass and punishes the children under his care by caning them because he literally gets off on it. It's hard to feel sympathy when Y'gonolac devours him.
  • * Zigzagged in "Dead Giveaway" (1976) by J. Vernon Shea, a short story set in the Mythos where practically everyone in town turns out to be one of these. The victims included a nice old man who stands up against bullies and is later revealed to be a Nazi that fed razorblades to children in their Halloween candy because they wouldn't get off his lawn, a poor mentally ill lady that is the mockery of the town who is later revealed to have killed her little brother when she was young and was driven mad with guilt, and the neighborhood children... well, Kids Are Cruel and Teens Are Monsters. One character that seems to be a Jerkass from the offset, the "mean old lady," turns out to be just grieving for her dead son. She is the only one who survives.
• Dark Days Of Hamburger Halpin: Chambers was a Jerk Jock, a bully who targeted pretty much every one, had coerced most of the girls in his grade and his algebra teacher into sleeping with him, and started beating up his girlfriend after he got her pregnant and she refused to get an abortion. So it's a little hard to feel sorry for him when he's found dead at the bottom of a mine shaft.
• Offscreen in the Darkest Powers trilogy, Derek Souza broke a kid's back merely by throwing him at a wall, rendering him paraplegic. Later on, it turns out that Derek had only thrown the kid because he and two others were threatening his younger brother Simon Bae with knives, and Derek's werewolf instincts cause his protective streak to go into overdrive. Later, he goes on to kill another werewolf who was about to rape and kill Chloe, the girl he's in love with, though he regrets it bitterly afterwards. As it turns out, all of the people Derek physically hurts (on purpose, anyway) have done something or another to justify the beatdown.
• Usually not seen in Discworld, where posthumous dialogue between victims and Death tends to paint all but the worst villains in a sympathetic light. Used straight with Homicidal Lord Winder from Night Watch Discworld, though: a paranoid former Patrician so universally despised that, when an undisguised assassin walked up to him in the midst of a grand ball, the majority of guests either allowed it to happen or actively distracted Winder's few supporters. Moments before he's killed the person who arranged it reassures herself that his general unpleasantness eases any qualms about his inhumation, and elsewhere Vimes figures it was these unpleasant qualities that made sure nobody investigated terribly hard.
  • Averted in The Fifth Elephant: Wolf is an unrepentant killer, but when Vimes kills him by deliberately throwing a lit flare at him, knowing he can't resist the impulse to catch it in his mouth, he does not use a Bond One-Liner, as that would make it murder.
  • Generally, when Death doesn't give a neutral/hopeful message when you meet him, you're this. Examples include the Agatean chancellor in Mort, and the grag terrorist in Raising Steam.
• In A Dog's Way Home, Dutch's previous owner Kurch turns out to be a homophobic jerk who refuses responsibility of Dutch after getting seriously injured in an avalanche that almost killed them both. Kurch was only injured because he went skiing in a restricted area.
• Dopamine gives us Julie. She's unlikeable from the start — arrogant, belligerent, presumptive, and self-important. When she crosses the Moral Event Horizon by pouring industrial-grade acid all over Rex's face, you know her fate is sealed.
• In Das Dorf Der Moerder by Elisabeth Herrmann, it turns out that all victims of the killer raped a woman who was prostituted by her husband. The only reason one is glad that he's caught at the end is that he also tried to kill the policewoman investigating the case, as well as two other people who came to find out what happened.
• The Downloaded: One of the main characters killed his childhood bully after the guy found him years later and started bullying him online. He didn't intend to kill him, merely to confront him after learning his identity. But the guy turned out to be a conservative extremist who hated that his childhood victim was a "liberal snowflake" and was trying to ruin his life so his liberal views didn't corrupt his daughter. That drove the guy into a rage, resulting in the bully being impaled with garden shears.
• A Dowry of Blood: As a vampire, Constanta only targets the most odious of victims to feed on, including general jerkasses like guys who will spit on a beggar or sexually harass a woman by grabbing her arm.
• Edward in Dragon and Damsel. He is hit by lightning, falls down a tower, and ends up in the hospital...after he rallied a town to storm a castle and attempted to kill a dragon he was told was intelligent and sapient, claiming it to be in the best interests of the town and Bernadette.
• In Dragon Bones, Landislaw is killed by the villain, after he has outlived his usefulness. The only reason one feels sorry for him is the fact that he's eaten alive by a monster. Interestingly, the fact that he's an asshole is the reason why he was killed. The plan was to assassinate his older brother (who tried to protect him all the time!) and put him in charge of the estate. However, while his older brother was at the king's court, he made himself so unpopular with the people on the estate, that the villain decided he would have to put someone else in charge, as Landislaw would have been murdered sooner or later. The main villain thinks it'd better be "sooner".
• Dragons of Requiem has many depraved villains, but the Rot Gang consists of three Jerkass teenagers who spend their time insulting each other and collecting body parts for Dies Irae and his army of mimics. Absolutely no one is upset when the trio is killed off at the end of their debut chapter.
• Used a couple times in The Dresden Files.
  • In Fool Moon, a vicious mob hitman nicknamed "Spike" is killed by a werewolf. Even his employer, John Marcone, who otherwise cares for his employees (to one degree or another), doesn't even mention Spike over the course of the book.
  • In Turn Coat, Aleron LaFortier, a member of the Wizard's Senior Council, is murdered, and you're not shown anyone mourning for him either. LaFortier was shown in an earlier book to want to throw Harry to the vampires, so this might be a case of Protagonist-Centered Morality, plus the suspected murderer is a member of the White Council meaning most of the Wizards are much more worried about a potential traitor than mourning the dead. Harry is also too busy trying to work out who killed LaFortier in the first place to worry about much of anything else.
• Dr. Harper Therapy: The Influencer Files plays this for horror. One story has a terrorist stream his torture of someone with a history of making bigoted and otherwise offensive comments online. While some of the comments about the videos hope the victim will be saved, others believe her past awful behavior means she deserves it. Some people outright express pleasure that she's suffering, one calling it the best stream of the year and another asking if anyone else was getting a boner. Dr. Harper notes that he feels no need to join that particular website now.
• In the Dr. Thorndyke novel Mr. Pottermack's Oversight, the victim is guilty of such infamies that Dr. Thorndyke is driven to remark that "hanging would be a great deal too good for him"; in the end, Thorndyke concludes that being killed by one of his own victims is no more than the man deserved, and lets the killer go free.
• Ellen and Otis: Non-fatally for Otis himself in the final chapter of Otis Spofford, when Ellen and Austine finally get the better of him and when even his close friends, Stewy and George, side with the girls against him (of course, they have their own reasons to enjoy witnessing Otis's comeuppance). Even though Otis has it coming, one can't help feeling at least a little sorry for him.
• Endgame has Zorro, who bullies the protagonist mercilessly for months, and pays the price when he snaps and shoots up his high school.
• "Eric The Pie": Eric, a sadistic animal abuser who ate animals live in increasingly cruel ways - including sexually assaulted a calf while eating it alive - and eats a coworker by disemboweling her ends up dies a painful, humiliating death in his own torture den, at the teeth of the very animals he tormented for so long. It could not have happened to a nicer guy.
• Fer-de-lance Apparently going to be averted, since everyone who knew Peter Barstow thought he was a wonderful person with not an enemy in the world, then played straight when it turns out his death was Murder by Mistake. The intended victim is a cold, self-righteous man who takes pride in always having "played by the rules". That includes killing his wife and her lover in cold blood — and right in front of his three-year-old son, when he caught them in flagrante. Then he abandoned the child to the care of his mother's family and ignored his existence until he decided he wanted grandchildren. He doesn't think that the boy (now 25 years older) could possibly resent being treated like this.
• Roger Malcolm in Fire in a Canebrake. The true story of a lynching. Blame the writer, as the book attempts to present Malcolm's lynching as the tragedy it actually was while painting Malcolm as a monster.
• Jack Ritchie's short story "For All the Rude People". The protagonist gets fed up with deliberate rudeness and emotional cruelty in society and starts murdering anyone who's rude in his presence.
• Robert A. Heinlein's Friday. Lieutenant Dickey is described as someone who had repeatedly tried to sleep with Friday's friend Janet despite being repeatedly told no, as "slimy", and as having "a size-twelve ego in a size-four soul". About a minute later, Friday kills him as he's trying to arrest one of her friends at gunpoint.
• Frank Bennett, wife beater and rapist, disappears in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, and no one really cares, not even the officer who investigates the cases and later becomes the judge who hears the case against Idgie and Big George.
• A number of David Gemmell books give POV to a minor villain for just long enough that the hero(es) feeding him a length of their preferred weapon seems welcome. The Swords of Night And Day, for example, has a few pages with a minor officer who's a douche to his subordinate and doesn't even bother to remember the names of his (admittedly inhuman) troops, joking around with a dying civilian, looting his house, and musing on how much fun it is to abuse his power to get sexual favours before Skilgannon and Harad turn up and kill him.
• Done several times in the Give Yourself Goosebumps series. Notably, several bad endings occur as a result of deliberately selfish choices by the reader (such as leaving your five-year-old sister alone with an escaped mummy in "Diary of a Mad Mummy"); and in "All-Day Nightmare", one choice allows you to shoot the villain of the storyline into space. When your friend points out that you killed someone, you simply respond that she was evil.
• Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi's Jin Guangshan is a truly loathsome piece of work. To start with: serial womanizer (who particularly targets women of lower social standing than him because it makes them easier to control) and rapist who flaunts his dalliances in front of his wife and son. Uses and abuses any of the illegitimate children who make the mistake of wanting any kind of familial acknowledgment from him and simply leaves the rest (if he even remembers they exist) to rot. And then there are all the lives he ruins (or ends) in the name of greed and political power. Even after it's discovered that his death was arranged by one of said abused bastard sons, nobody has any sympathy for him as a person whatsoever, they're just appalled at the son's rejection of filial piety.

H - J

• In the Halo novel Halo: The Cole Protocol, Bonifacio was a member of the security council of the asteroid colonies known as the Rubble; he later betrayed the Rubble by selling the coordinates of Earth to the Jackals, who'd give it to the Covenant. When the Rubble gets attacked by the Covenant, he scrams in an escape pod and tries to call a Covenant ship for help, but he doesn't know about the Covenants' policy of "Kill All Humans" and was vaporized by the vessel.
• The Hangman: Most of the townspeople, including the narrator himself, fall under this trope. Throughout the poem, they all stand idly by as the title character strings up people for spurious reasons, even though none of them are the man he allegedly built the gallows to specifically hang. Turns out he's hanging all of them, the narrator in particular, for letting him get away with it.
  "First the alien, then the Jew, I did no more than you let me do."
• Hannibal:
  • In the book by Thomas Harris, several of his victims are completely unsympathetic and deserve their eventual fate. The rich guy who is funding a private effort to capture and kill him is a child molester, even raped his own sister. The cop who found him tried to sell him to the rich guy for millions of dollars instead of telling the FBI. The doctor who toyed with him and discredited Clarice Starling when he was in prison was a blowhard and a jerk, and Paul Krendler (the guy who got his brain eaten) was a Dept of Justice director who derailed Starling's career for not sleeping with him and colludes with the rich guy to capture Lecter. Each eventually died gruesomely.
  • Lampshaded by Lecter's prison caretaker, who explains that Lecter preferentially kills rude people, sparing those who demonstrate graciousness.
  • After Dr. Lecter became a lucrative commodity thanks to the film adaptations, the creators suddenly made Lecter exclusively a Jerkass killer: in Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs almost none of Lecter's victims is an explicit asshole; only after Hannibal they were ALL retconned to be this trope.
• Harry Potter:
  • In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Hermione slaps a very deserving Draco across the face after he spent the book being his usual spoiled self and campaigning to have Buckbeak killed for behaving like a hippogriff after he received an injury due to ignoring instructions in class and pushing his gloating a little too far.
  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire starts with the local Muggles' viewpoint of the murder of the Riddle family, for whom no one wastes any breath feeling sorry. That said, they didn't sympathize with the man suspected of the murder either, even though he was never charged. They were very snobbish, abusive, and cruel and their son was very vocal with his elitist mentality.
  • Played with in the case of Barty Crouch. He's introduced as a stuffy man who sacked his House Elf while ignoring her sobbing pleas and tossed his neglected son into Azkaban. He becomes less of an asshole when the readers realize that he had good damned reason to at least have his son locked up, and the last time Crouch is seen alive, he's insane, terrified, and trying his hardest to warn Dumbledore about the planned return of Voldemort.
    • He was also more sympathetic in the movie adaptation where his son is seen as an unambiguously depraved, all-grown-up lunatic before he locked him up, rather than a scared, young boy who only shows at the end his real nature.
  • In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Fred and George toss the bully Montague headfirst into a Vanishing Cabinet when he becomes part of Umbridge's Inquisitorial Squad and attempts to use his newfound power over them. He's left in a "confused" state for weeks and exactly what happened isn't revealed until the next book: the Vanishing Cabinet was actually broken, meaning that Montague was left trapped in some sort of limbo and could only escape by apparating. He barely managed it, despite having not yet passed his test, and it almost killed him. Presumably the Twins did not know this, as they assumed that all the cabinet would do was send him somewhere and they did not care where.
  • The hospital wards in St Mungo's seem to be named for high-profile patients. The ward for long-term spell damage is named Janus Thickey, who faked having been eaten by a lethifold so he could desert his wife and move in with his mistress. The implication is that his wife hexed the bejabbers out of him when she found out.
  • Morfin Gaunt, a Muggle-Hater with psychotic tendencies, who liked to mistreat his sister, is framed by Voldemort for the murder of the Riddle Family, has his memories altered so he thinks he performed them and spends the rest of his life in Azkaban over this. He even acts proud over thinking he committed the murders and is only upset about losing his Father's ring.
  • In Deathly Hallows, after Peter Pettigrew momentarily hesitated in his attempt to kill Harry, he was strangled to death by the artificial silver hand Voldemort had given him. No one in the fandom wept.
  • Loxias was such a monster that everyone—including his own mother—confessed to killing him. His murder was never solved.
  • Molly Weasley killing Bellatrix Lestrange after the latter tried to kill Ginny is considered the series' biggest Moment of Awesome.
  • The entire series is devoted to building up how evil Voldemort is, to the point where it is immensely satisfying when he finally dies.
  • The greatest example would be Dolores Umbridge. When her fate in the fifth book wasn't enough, Word of God had to have her locked up in The Alcatraz for life.
• The first third or so of Headhunters is taken up with protagonist Roger Brown ably demonstrating what a self-absorbed, misogynist prick he is, which makes it very hard to have much sympathy for him when everything starts going wrong.
• In Heroes Of The Sigil, sequel to Warlocks of the Sigil we are introduced to Resiak in the first chapter while he is being cruel at a party he hosts, which he apparently does to control people, he is killed at the end of the first chapter, apart from a few friends most people are not sad, even though he is a War Hero (most people note in the ways this can overlap with war criminal).
• Holes:
  • Kissin' Kate Barlow's first victim was the corrupt sheriff, who allowed the burning of her school and the murder of Sam. He brutally refused to help Kate when she begged for help, even trying to blackmail a kiss from Kate to save Sam from being hanged, but admit that he would still drive Sam away from town afterwards. Granted, the implication was that his behavior was caused by him being drunk, but it still at the very least really irresponsible of a guy to get drunk on a night when the town's gone insane and undoubtedly needs law enforcement.
  • The rest of the town is implied to count as well. Every one of them turns against Sam, and not long after, the lake dries up, suggesting that a number of people died of thirst or had to abandon their homes.
• The Hollow Ones:
  • Downplayed. Cary Peters was undoubtedly corrupt, but the narrative makes it clear that Obediah's body-jacking of him and subsequently trying to kill his whole family while in his body was something he was totally undeserving of.
  • Played straighter with the Klansmen that Blackwood humiliates after they threaten Solomon.
  • Hack Casby, the white lynching victim, was the head of a local chapter of the Citizen's Council, a white supremacist organization.
• Happens several times in the Honor Harrington novels, but also twisted into variations.
  • In The Honor Of The Queen when Harrington finds out what had happened to the female prisoners taken by the Masadans (raped and murdered, with only two survivors), she's physically restrained at the last minute from cold-bloodedly executing the senior Masadan officer they've captured... not because anyone is particularly worried about having him dead, but because they don't want her to ruin her career over it.
  • When people find out that Cordelia Ransome was killed in a particularly dramatic way when Harrington and company escaped her ship, no one, even her allies running Haven, is very heartbroken about her death.
  • Later, when Thomas Theisman has pulled off his coup and gained control over Haven, he captures Oscar St-Just, head of State Sec and current dictator, and instead of putting him on trial, puts a brutal and incredibly satisfying end to the Committee via pulser dart to St-Just's head. No one except some State Sec die-hards is particularly distressed over this, and in fact probably couldn't be heard anyway over the joyous hullabaloo.
  • Out of all the things the Mesan Alignment has done, killing former Manticoran foreign secretary Elaine Descroix once she has outlived her usefulness is probably the one thing that actually got them some sympathy points with the readers, as Descroix was probably the worst example of a Corrupt Politician in the entire High Ridge government (which was composed entirely of such characters).
• Almost invoked in The Hunger Games in the case of the Career tributes. The other districts, and Katniss, hate them for being better fed, formally trained, and gleefully murderous. So she doesn't really care (at first) when they die, especially Marvel, who killed Rue, and Clove, who would have killed her if she wasn't Evil Gloating.
• Huntress, an Urban Fantasy short story in Tortall and Other Lands, has the Pack, a group of sociopathic Spoiled Brat track stars who like to meet up on nights when the moon is full in order to hunt and kill humans. They claim that all their victims deserve it, and some of them clearly were terrible people, but they also reminisce about murdering a flasher. When Corey, a good runner with a competitive streak, falls in with the Pack they seem welcoming and invite her on a full moon run in Central Park, only to turn on her completely the moment she refuses to participate. She didn't "know her place" when she started outrunning some of them and especially now, when she invokes morality. They become the Asshole Victims themselves when Corey's patron Goddess appears and The Hunter Becomes the Hunted.
• The In Death series by J.D. Robb, as a long-running mystery series following a homicide detective, inevitably has no few examples. Eve starts out essentially forcing herself to sympathize with them and feel for them despite her personal distaste for their behavior.
  • Witness In Death is notable as the first instance in which Eve is forced to admit that she can't sympathize with the victim or feel any particular regret for his death. He starts out as a nasty, small-minded prima donna and just gets worse with every single thing that's found out, culminating in the revelation that the young actress he'd been sleeping with was his daughter, a fact he knew when they began their relationship and she didn't. The young woman's birth mother (who'd given her up for adoption) warned him of the connection in the hopes of preventing him from crossing the line into incest, only for him to rub the sexual relationship in her face and smugly suggest that she join them in a threesome! Between this and his other misdeeds, the victim would likely have been facing a life sentence if found out by the law before the murder, and that's mainly because the relevant jurisdiction wouldn't have the death penalty available. It's a good book to read for anyone wondering why a court system might employ justifiable homicide as a separate claim from self-defense (though there's a decent "defense of another" argument as well).
  • The initial victim in Brotherhood In Death is painted right off the bat as a smug, self-centered politician who's been trying to pressure his Nice Guy cousin into agreeing to sell their late grandparents' home against their grandfather's express wishes. Eve eventually discovers that he, the two other victims, and three other men had a yearly tradition of drugging, abducting, and gang-raping a young woman, counting on the drugs to keep her from remembering the assault afterwards. They did this once a year for forty-nine years. It's hard not to take the killer's side after this comes out; Eve herself mostly feels bitterly disappointed that they were killed before she could have them locked up in prison and that their killers will have to go to jail for murder despite being the real victims of the piece.
• In the IKS Gorkon novels from the current Star Trek Novel 'Verse, there's the Elabrej. The Klingons are in Elabrej space on a mission of general conquest; Klingon Captain Klag and his crew are nonetheless the protagonists of the series. The Elabrej government is oppressive and they're close to societal collapse anyway, with their general Crapsack World status making it easier to get behind the Klingon attempts to stomp all over them.

The Invisible Detective: The present-day plot of Killing Time features a crew of zombie pirates who died in a shipwreck 150 years earlier. However, contrary to initial impressions, they aren't after the descendants of the villagers who deliberately wrecked their ship to claim the salvage, with the captain saying that "they had as much right to trick us onto the rocks as we had to attack merchantmen and raid coastal ports."

• In the short story "Invitation to a Poisoning", Nechtan confesses to adultery, theft, perjury, election fraud, armed robbery, and attempted rape to the respective victims of the crimes and then promptly drops dead of cyanide poisoning. Having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, he committed suicide in a manner calculated to involve his enemies in an inconvenient murder investigation.
• In The Iron Teeth the protagonist Blacknail kills the bandit Ferret in a brutal fashion. He was a bullying bigot though so no one really cared.
• Jacquou The Rebel:
  • Laborie, the overseer for the Nansac family domains, extorted the tenants, cheated them for the rents, and sexually harassed women so nobody much mourned him when the father of the hero shot him after Laborie had his dog shot, wounding his wife. The first person to see his body flatly said he had it coming, and other onlookers have this reaction. Laborie was hated so much his murderer was hidden by pretty much the entire region until a farmhand was blackmailed to rat him.
  • The Nansacs themselves were so tyrannical against their tenants that, after the hero led farmers to burh their castle, he is acquitted by the jury even after confessing the crime.
• Jaine Austen Mysteries: It's a murder mystery series. What else would you expect?
  • Stacey Lawrence from This Pen for Hire was a manipulative Alpha Bitch.
  • Quinn Kirkland, the heartbreaking jerk from Last Writes. Not only was he cheating on multiple women (one of which is likely underage), but a careless prank of putting a snake in a glovebox while working as a valet got Wells Dumont's wife killed, which inspired Wells to kill Quinn.
  • SueEllen Kingsley from Killer Blonde. An abusive Rich Bitch who treated her stepdaughter like trash.
  • Frenchie, AKA Giselle Ambrose from Shoes to Die For. A home-wrecker, a greedy bitch, and an extortionist.
  • Marybeth Olsen from The PMS Murder. She screwed over her "friend" Colin by not making him a partner in her company, caused the accident that slowly killed Doris' husband, was sleeping with Rochelle's husband, and actually had the gall to offer to give Ashley Morgan a loan at "1% less than a bank rate."
  • Vic Cleveland from Death by Pantyhose, a comedian who steals jokes, cheats on his lovers left and right, and is a blackmailer. There's just so much of the man to hate.
  • Garth Janken, Amoral Attorney and blackmailer from "The Danger of Candy Canes".
  • Patti Devane and Julio from Killing Bridezilla. The former for being a Spoiled Brat and Alpha Bitch, the latter for covering the killer's ass.
  • Graham Palmer III from Killer Cruise a shallow Gold Digger who went through women like tissues.
  • Bunny Cooper from Death of a Trophy Wife was a gold digging bitch who treated everyone around her horribly.
  • Mallory Francis from Pampered to Death, a horrifically stuck-up and entitled bitch.
  • Dr. Preston McCay from "The Dangers of Gingerbread Cookies". A womanizing and possibly racist jerk.
  • Cryptessa Muldoon, AKA Eleanor Jenkins, from Death of a Neighborhood Witch was a miserable and bitter old bird who treated her neighbors like less than dirt.
  • Scotty, the definitive Jerkass Mall Santa from "Nightmare on Elf Street".
  • Joy Amoroso from Killing Cupid was a swindler and a control freak.
  • Dean Oliver from Murder Has Nine Lives, a sleazy Con Man who stole his great invention of Skinny Kitty along with others and was cheating on his wife with women left, right, and center.
  • Hope Harper from Death of a Bachelorette, a conniving Alpha Bitch.
  • Scotty Parker from Death of a Neighborhood Scrooge, a bitter, petty, and misanthropic has-been child actor, with a fist tighter than Ebenezer's.
  • Tommy LaSalle from Death of a Gigolo, a blackmailing, gold digging, and abusive Slimeball.
    • From the same book, Emma says the real Daisy Kincaid was "a sour old fossil" who treated her like dirt, but we only have her word to go on.
  • Bebe Braddock from Murder Gets a Makeover, a cruel and backstabbing makeover guru.
  • Really, the only one of the victims to not be a prick in some way is Amy Leighton from Death by Tiara, whose only crime was wanting to report her boss Candace for taking bribes.
• Jeff the Killer: Jeff's first kills were Randy, Keith, and Troy, a trio of bullies who went around mugging kids and threatening them with knives. After Jeff beat the crap out of them, they got his brother sent to Juvy, and later attacked him at a birthday party to try and kill him, threatening to shoot anyone if they interfered.
• John Dies at the End has Billy Hitchcock, a bully and implied rapist who was Driven to Suicide after one of his victims retaliated by stabbing out his eyes.
• Just Revenge: In 1942 in Lithuania, Marcellus Prandus killed off the Menuchen family except Sarah Chava who he raped and sent to work as a prostitute; Max survived by sheer luck. In 1999, Max kidnapped Prandus and drove him to suicide by convincing him that his descendants were all murdered.

K - Q

• Kate Shugak: Finn Grant, who is murdered in Restless in the Grave, is a Corrupt Corporate Executive that dabbles in blackmail and runs a black market arms dealership.
• Stephen King has many examples:
  • Nearly everyone in Carrie save Sue Snell (who survives). The famous scene where Carrie kills everyone at the prom is supposed to be deliberately horrifying in the book and film, but the effect is nullified somewhat when you are cheering her on. Carrie's date started out this way, but by the time the prom rolled around, he had actually grown to like her. Pity she never found that out...
  • In Bag of Bones, primary antagonist Max Devore dies suddenly, an apparent suicide. His most direct victims celebrate his death. The rest of his town knows what really killed him and wonders which of them is next. Nobody mourns for his death, however.
  • King's Sherlock Holmes pastiche, "The Doctor's Case" (in Nightmares & Dreamscapes), features such a victim, physically abusive to his wife and psychologically abusive to her and their three sons (all adults). Just to cap it off, the victim plans to leave his wife and sons penniless when he dies (death of natural causes is mere months away and he knows it) by leaving his fortune to a cat shelter. Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade collectively agree the deceased had it coming and drop the investigation.
• Knight and Rogue Series:
  • The first two victims of arson in the second book are a brothel and the home of the resident Hanging Judge, who manages to be far less sympathetic than the brothel by showing more concern for his clothes than any of his clients' legal papers, and by promptly accusing Michael of the fire, demanding he be hanged on the spot no less.
  • When Fisk and Michael meet, Fisk is on trial for conning a whole slew of asshole victims.
  • Subverted in the first book. While Michael and Fisk spend a good amount of time speculating about how the victim may have had it coming, it turns out he was neither an asshole nor was he murdered.
• Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series is fond of this trope.
  • All of the victims in The Fifth Woman, for example, were themselves horrible criminals who had been Karma Houdinis up to that point.
  • Sidetracked is also full of these, from the ex-justice minister with a dark secret to the murderer's father who was abusive to his family.
• Josh Lanyon almost might be said to specialize in this; a good proportion of his mysteries involve the murder of characters who were contemptuous, arrogant, and insulting to those around them, both to go for the Everyone Is a Suspect scenario and to give the protagonist himself a motive and thus bring him under suspicion. In Somebody Killed His Editor, for example, the two victims—Peaches Sadler and Stephen Krass, the titular editor—were each abrasive, opinionated jerks, abusive to everyone in general and to the protagonist, Christopher Holmes, in particular. Lanyon's skill allows the murders to nonetheless assume weight and meaning as tragic choices for ordinary people driven to kill.
• Downplayed and deconstructed to an extent with Suzanne in Let Me Call You Sweetheart. By all accounts she was selfish, materialistic, immature and blatantly unfaithful to her husband, but even then few of the characters think she deserved to die (especially in such a brutal manner; she was strangled to death with her own belt and had roses allegedly given to her by a lover spitefully thrown over her corpse). Her killer's excuse for murdering her comes across as extremely petty, making him out to be a far worse person. Kerry's investigation into Suzanne's backstory also partly explains why she could be so awful and she comes across as quite a pitiable figure.
• In Lolita, it's hard to feel bad for Quilty when Humbert kills him for "saving" Lo. Where Humbert was a pedophile, Quilty was a pedophile, alcoholic, smoker, and drug abuser, who kicked Dolly out of his home because she refused to take part in the sexual acts he and his friends engaged in. There isn't much to sympathize with.
• In Lonely Werewolf Girl part of Kalix's Back Story is she killed her father; when readers briefly meet him on a trip to the afterlife, it's pretty clear he got off easy with just death.
• Roughly half the victims in Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey novels qualify. Most of the others are old and ill enough to have had a life expectancy measured in at most months even before they were murdered.
  • Sir Reuben, the victim of the first book, Whose Body? seems to be a subversion. Generally, if a businessman is killed in a Golden Age mystery novel, he is a Corrupt Corporate Executive, and if the character is Jewish, as Sir Reuben is, this is certainly going to be true. While Sayers goes with the conventional wisdom/racism by having him be a fairly ruthless businessman, against type he is beloved by his family and liked or at least respected by his servants and business associates. Reading his diaries reveals to Wimsey that he is, in his private life, a rather dull-but-decent type who dotes on his loved ones.
  • Strong Poison: Phillip Boyes. In the immortal words of Lord Peter, "If only that young man were alive today, how dearly I should like to kick his bottom for him." Boyes got a woman to live with him out of wedlock by claiming to be above marriage, then proposed to her, and was an emotionally abusive jerk to her during their entire relationship. Anyone would want to kick his ass. That she was Peter's true love was only icing on the cake.
  • The Five Red Herrings had Sandy Campbell, a foul-tempered alcoholic who seriously hurt someone at the golf course, threatened people's lives, and physically attacked his neighbor.
  • If anything, Geoffrey Deacon in The Nine Tailors is beyond an Asshole Victim, so foul and evil that he is by most readings the real villain of the book. Made even more unusual for a mystery novel by the fact that Lord Peter and seven local residents killed him by accident.
  • Murder Must Advertise: Victor Dean was a blackmailer.
  • Busman's Honeymoon: Noakes was another blackmailer, as well as a grasping miser who'd stiff anyone he got the chance to. Both Harriet and Peter are tempted to withhold evidence because they have more sympathy for the suspects—even supposing them to have done it—than for the victim.
  • Mr. Plant, the titular victim of the short story "The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face", is horrible to his subordinates.
• In A Macabre Myth of a Moth-Man, Dr. Wu is introduced as the scientist who spent a full year Playing with Syringes to change Moth from an ordinary guy into a mutant moth creature. As the book and its sequel go on, it's also revealed that he had been performing his experiments on war criminals and people he bought off the Chinese black market since the 1950s at least and definitely took pleasure in what he did to Oz and Moth. No one at all was sorry when he was shot not long before the events of the book happen. Played with in the case of Leone Trent and Reisenburgh, who both are established as extremely unpleasant people (the owner of the company that hired Wu and condoned his experiments and a Fat Bastard who was just as tied up in the corporation backstabbing business as the rest), but Moth feels sorry for both of their deaths, believing that no one deserves to go the way they did.
• Patricia Wentworth played with this in her Maud Silver books.
  • Latter End (1947): Lois Latter (The Vamp) had married now-Henpecked Husband James Latter for his money, and exploited all the other women in the household, in some cases just for spite. She actually died because one of the other women suspected her of tampering with James' drink, and switched the cups.
  • Spotlight (1947), also known as Wicked Uncle: The victim was a blackmailer; the U.S. title is due to his being the uncle of the female protagonist, who'd made his wife, her guardian, miserable throughout their marriage.
  • Miss Silver Comes to Stay (1949): James Lessiter, upon finally claiming his mother's estate, begins settling all his debts (somewhat subverted in that at least two of the people with financial motives to kill him had been robbing the estate and aren't particularly sympathetic characters).
  • The Gazebo (1956): The victim was My Beloved Smother; her daughter's fiance was suspected of having finally snapped.
• Millennium Series: Nils Bjurman was named guardian for Lisbeth Salander and abuses his position to brutally rape her. Lisbeth then made him an Embarrassing Tattoo stating he was a "sadistic swine, a pervert and a rapist". Then he was murdered by Ronald Niedermann after he asked him for a hit against Lisbeth and Ronald thought he would endanger him. The reader is not likely to mourn him, nor did the police after they found this tattoo in his body and learnt the truth about it.
• Mr. Wagstaffe from the Montague Egg short story "False Weight" had a wife (using a different name each time) in every town his rounds took him to.
• In Le Morte D Arthur Gawain says that he doesn’t mind that Lancelot killed Agravain, his brother, because he was kind of a dick. Unfortunately, he does care about his two other (full-blooded) brothers...
• Rex Stout worked with this a lot in the Nero Wolfe mysteries; victims are usually at least fairly unpleasant people.
  • Death of a Dude (1969): The victim had seduced a local girl, fathered a child out of wedlock, and wouldn't take any responsibility for the baby's welfare; her father, an old friend of Archie's, was arrested for murder just before the opening of the story.
  • A Family Affair (1975): The first victim is attempting blackmail.
  • In the Best Families (1950): The final victim is a major organized crime figure.
  • The short story "Murder is Corny" (1961): The victim was a stalker and a blackmailer.
  • The novella "Black Orchids" (1941): The victim was blackmailing one character and trying the Scarpia Ultimatum on another.
  • The short story "Death of a Demon" takes this to a whole new level; not only is the titular victim a blackmailer, but he's also a sadist.
  • In the short story "Die Like a Dog" the victim was a lecher and had the bad sense to go and taunt his victim's estranged husband about this.
  • In Too Many Cooks Philip Laslzo appears to have made it his hobby to be a snide, underhanded prick to everyone who he comes across, and particularly seems to have enjoyed antagonising hot-headed, thin-skinned egotists with a fondness for vocally threatening to kill people who piss them off for whatever reason.
  • Subverted in the first novel, Fer-de-lance, in which one of the victims is almost universally described as a borderline saint who was loved and admired by everyone he met, making it almost impossible to figure out who killed him and why. Double-subverted; they then realise that his death must have been a mistake, and meet the intended victim, who is a colossal dick. Things become clearer.
• Mother 2 novelization: Aloysius Minch scams the father of Ness until the latter parent had to take a business trip as part of the former's breaking game in hopes of stealing his secret burger recipes and wife along with encouraging Porky, Aloysius's son, to continue being a pawn for Giygas while having aware of the entity's influence on him all to enrich himself. He ends up starving to death in the Deep Darkness with Porky marking a message to see him in hell thanks to him having been a "scrawny greedy" scumbag. Granted, Mr. Minch's fate gets undone, but he still gets busted thanks to him stealing money.
• Downplayed with Alison in Nighttime Is My Time. By all accounts she was never a very pleasant person and could be ruthless as a talent agent, making a lot of enemies. At her memorial, most people aren't especially torn up by her death, with only Jean being genuinely saddened. Even then though, her murder is still presented as a horrific act and not something she deserved. Some characters also express distaste when others dismiss or joke about her death even if she was a jerk.
• Night World: At the start of Huntress (1997), Jez and her gang hunt a group of skinheads, whom Jez says murdered an innocent person not long ago (it's implied the murder was racially-motivated). It's indicated that the gang often chooses these kinds of people to hunt. Jez does still feel uncomfortable when the leader begins pleading for mercy and she ultimately decides to let them all go, though they come off as pathetic more than anything.
• Simon in One of Us is Lying is murdered by someone spiking his water with peanut oil, activating his peanut allergy and suffocating him. The thing is, Simon ran a blog that posted secrets and unflattering gossip about everyone else in school which makes it hard for most of the school to sympathize and means Everyone Is a Suspect.
• Bob Sheldon in The Outsiders, who is knifed to death while trying to drown the main character in a fountain.
• The first Percy Jackson and the Olympians book has Percy's stepfather "Smelly Gabe" turned to stone by his wife. Usually, a good guy turning someone into stone is pretty bad, but Gabe commits Domestic Abuse to Sally and is an asshole to her and Percy, so people will not care at worst and cheer at best.
  • In the Sequel series The Heroes of Olympus, Nico meets a really vicious, Roman demigod. He frankly admits that he killed his legionnaire for fun and that he likes to torture humans and animals to death. He also wants to kill Nico and Reyna. To his bad luck, Nico is a very powerful demigod.
  • Octavian also qualifies for this. He wants to attack Camp Half-Blood, and kill all the demigods there, simply for the reason that they are Greek demigods, not Roman. In addition, he treats his own people badly and is even allied with monsters in order to get the bloodshed that he wants. As a result, the heroes do not warn him as he stands too close to a catapult, and nobody misses him when he inevitably dies from being launched by it. Even his most loyal bodyguard saw what was going to happen and did nothing to stop it.
• Perfidia: The LAPD eventually frames a Japanese man named Fujio Shudo for the brutal murder of a local Japanese family. He's completely innocent of the crime, and he's so zonked out on terpin hydrate during the interrogation that the police are able to manipulate him into confessing. But he's a violent rapist, a drug addict, and an all-around scumbag and psychopath, which makes him perfect as a scapegoat.
• In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Charlie's father's family were victims of domestic abuse by his grandmother's second husband. Eventually, Charlie's great-uncle Phil finds out about the situation, gathers up a group of people, and beat the husband enough that he dies sometime later in the hospital.
• In Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher stories:
  • Death by Water: Nearly all of the victims of the jewel thefts aboard the S.S. Hinemoa have left victims in their wake (excepting the first woman, who was just a Spoiled Brat), generally in financial trouble: the singer abandoned her young daughter to grow up in a slum, the vindictive Mr. West sacked a young man for hanging around Mrs. West, and so on.
    • Mr. Singer kills Jack Mason's man, Thomas. Later it's revealed Thomas was on the Titanic as a steward- and many of the stewards blocked the passages on the ship so the First Class passengers could escape while condemning everyone else to die.
  • Flying Too High: The elder Mr. McNaughton sexually abused his wife and daughter.
  • Murder in Montparnasse: Hector Chambers is the target of a ransom demand for his missing daughter - he's bad-tempered and sexist, and pulls a gun on Miss Fisher several times when she figures out something without being told (he assumes she's in on it).
    • Rene abused every woman he was with, killed two innocent men, and generally defined 'bastard'.
  • Dead Man's Chest: Bridget, a housemaid, kills Mrs. McNaster, her employer's mother-in-law- who works her companion to the bone and abuses her as much as she can. No one's upset.
  • Murder on the Ballarat Train: Mrs. Henderson was a terrible nag who constantly belittled her daughter. The murderer never expected the daughter to grieve for her mother, or to hire a private investigator to solve the murder.
  • General Harbottle in "Overheard on a Balcony" in A Question of Death: a blackmailing, wife-beating General Ripper who has no shortage of people willing to poison him.
• The Power:
  • Saudi Arabia and Moldova are the first countries to fall after the Power is awakened, Saudi Arabia being the world's most repressive regime toward women, and Moldova being the world capital of sex trafficking.
  • Likewise, Darrell Monke has a very ugly death that he very much deserved.
  • Allie electrocutes her foster father while he's raping her.
• An interesting variant occurs in the John Varley short story "Press Enter" about a hacker who'd been secretly running the world from his computer; although nobody that knew him had any reason to hate him enough to kill him while he was still alive, his posthumous release of all the embarrassing information he'd gathered on the people around him over the years had one police officer remarking that all the townspeople sure wished they could kill him now.
• The Queste del Saint Graal is one of the few works of Arthurian literature which takes note of how killing people should probably be avoided when possible. When searching for the grail, our heroes brutally kill the trio of brothers of Carteloise Castle; who, note, raped and murdered their own sister and threw their ailing father in the dungeon to rot, though even then Galahad and Percival have some guilt about it. Bors justifies their actions by basically invoking this trope and that this is what God intended, but Galahad, saying that that isn’t any of their business to decide for God, still needs a second opinion from a priest to indeed be convinced that the scumbags had it coming.

R - W

• A.J. Raffles connives at killing a blackmailer and when he finds that someone's beaten him to the victim, helps the real murderer escape justice. Later on in his career, he causes the deaths of several members of the Italian Comorra, including the man who killed his true love.
• In Rangers At Roadsend by Jane Fletcher, Sergeant Ellis always picks one of her subordinates and makes her life hell, so that the others obey in order to not become the unfavourite. She is jealous of people who are promoted over her and intentionally sticks to the letter of their orders to get them into trouble whenever she can. Lethal trouble, sometimes. When she is found dead with a knife in her back, the interesting question is not who had a motive to kill her (everyone did) but who had the opportunity.
• Bunny from The Secret History by Donna Tartt. He's misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic, a hater of Catholics, a compulsive thief, and he continually leeches off his friends, causing them to murder him.
• In The Secret Place by Tana French, the murdered boy turns out to have been this. He had always two or more girlfriends at the same time, and happily had sex with a girl who he knew never wanted to have sex with him but sacrificed herself so he'd stay away from her best friend. Its Complicated.
• In Septimus Heap, no one feels particularly sad when Jillie Djinn dies. She was very nasty to Beetle and largely to blame for Merrin's actions through her employing of him in the Manuscriptorium.
• The Shadowhunter Chronicles has numerous examples.
  • It starts in The Mortal Instruments:
    • Werewolf Maia's brother dies in a car accident long before the plot begins. He had beaten and mistreated her several times before, but no one believed Maia because her brother looked so innocent and handsome. It is also implied that he was an animal torturer. When he died in the car accident, Maia even felt liberated.
    • After Meliorn tricks the Clave into believing the Seelie Court was going to side with them, nobody was particularly sad when Alec shot with an arrow.
    • Camille Belcourt was a sneaky Smug Snake, allied with the second Big Bad, who loved to play with other people for her own personal gain. In the past, she is said to have murdered at least one innocent human, because he was too boring for her. She is finally killed by the younger vampire Maureen Brown.
    • Most of The Circle members who were killed in battle by vampires, werewolves, witches, fairies, or other Shadowhunters. They were a fanatical, vicious group that tortured and killed completely innocent Downworlders for no reason.
  • The Infernal Devices:
    • Aloysius Starkweather killed innocent Downworlders and collected their body parts as trophies and laughed at the idea that Shadowhunters and downwoldlers are equal. He also cruelly tortured at least one elf to death. This meant that nobody was sad when he met his end through automatons.
    • Nate Gray joined the Big Bad, poisoned his mother, and lied and betrayed his sister. Even before he became a criminal, he was a selfish and cold-hearted person. He played with Jessamine's feelings to make her a spy and was involved in at least one murder. After finding out that Tessa was not human, he called her a hideous creature. Shortly before he dies, however, he shows remorse, and Tessa cries for him, despite his evil deeds.
  • The Dark Artifices:
    • Half-werewolf Casper Sterling became a contract murderer for a lot of money. Unfortunately, his client had completely different plans with him.
    • Horace Dearborn was a fanatical, Smug Snake who tried to severely restrict Downworlder rights. He also gave orders to kill teenagers. And so nobody is sad when he is killed.
    • Dane Larkspear was a member of the Cohort, a misogynist and he made fun of Julian Blackthorn's dead sister and speaks openly of raping another of his sisters. Nobody shed a tear when Julian murdered him
    • After Julian Blackthorn and Emma Carstairs have become true nephilim, Martin Gladstone wants to keep them from fighting by capturing their families and killing them, even the young children. To his bad luck they hear him.
  • Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy: Clive Cartwright is a prejudiced bully who prepared a deadly trap for a classmate with two of his friends. They summon a demon to attack him. But the demon does not obey them and instead kills Clive.
  • Ghosts of the Shadow Market:
    • Leopolda Stainis a witch who feels attached to her demonic side (warlocks and witches are the common children of humans and demons there), and demons are always evil. After trying to continue the plan of the previous Big Bad, she is torn to pieces by a group of werewolves. But Jem Carstairs is horrified by this brutal murder.
    • Celine Montclaire was abused and beaten by her parents all her life. When they are wrongly accused, convicted, and executed, she does not speak in their favor, although she knows that they are innocent in this regard. But nobody can really blame her.
• The number of asshole victims in Shadow of the Conqueror is practically a Long List.
  • Daylen goes on a lynching spree at one point where he offs several rapists and murderers in vigilante justice.
  • Daylen later meets Blackheart, the most feared pirate captain on Tellos, and proceeds to give him the Vlad Țepeș treatment.
  • The entire crew of the Maraven, who are rapists and Human Traffickers to a man, and end up on the receiving end of Daylen's wrath shortly after Blackheart.
  • Jena, the leader of the Dawnists, whom Daylen murders in cold blood soon after meeting.
  • Daylen himself gets half his major bones broken, courtesy of Lyrah. He comments almost immediately afterwards that it was nothing he didn't deserve.
  • The Dalavian Council of Dukes, who have to deal with Daylen's fabricated rumor that they have sex with goats, although we only have Daylen's personal testimony to go on as to how much they actually deserved it.
• Sherlock Holmes dealt with a couple of these.
  • The most evil being Charles Augustus Milverton, who got rich by blackmailing people (only to ruin them anyway, for the fun of it). Holmes let the murderer go, having previously expressed extreme hatred for Milverton. Of course, Holmes and Watson likely couldn't admit they witnessed the murder, as they were burglarizing Milverton's house at the time.
    Holmes: My sympathies in this case are with the criminal, not the victim.
  • Holmes seems to have a tendency to let murders of spousal abusers slide. In Victorian Britain, hitting women is not okay.
  • The title character in "Black Peter" is a good example. When he's skewered with one of his own harpoons, nearly every one of his neighbors is glad. His own daughter explicitly tells Holmes and Watson that she's happy dear ol' dad is dead and she blesses the hand that struck him down.
  • Sir Eustace Brackenstall, the victim in "The Adventure of Abbey Grange." Brackenstall was a violent drunkard who did everything from repeatedly stab his wife Lady Brackenstall with a hatpin to douse her dog in oil and light it on fire. He eventually had his skull caved in by a sailor who'd fallen in love with Lady Brackenstall before she married her husband and had come to defend her from her husband's abuse. Holmes tracks down the sailor, and once he learns what really happened lets the sailor go.
  • The two victims in "A Study in Scarlet" (1887) definitely qualify, being murderers themselves as well as rapists, misogynists, hedonists, and religious extremists who, in turn, abandoned said religion (Mormonism) the second it became inconvenient for them. In this case, the reader is definitely expected to side with the murderer, especially when the second half of the book is devoted to retelling the background in which his girlfriend's father was killed by one of the victims and the other forced her to marry him, leading to what was implied to be her suicide. The one who killed the two victims was arrested but died from a preexisting medical condition before ever standing trial.
  • Although the murderer in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" was by no means a particularly upstanding gentleman, this trope applies to the victim McCarthy, who was a blackmailer and a Manipulative Bastard who treated his own son like a pawn.
  • In "The Illustrious Client", a woman named Kitty Winter threw vitriol (concentrated sulphuric acid) on Adelbert Gruner (who could be charitably described as a serial murderer and rapist), leaving him hideously disfigured. The court gave her the lowest possible sentence. This story was eventually updated for Elementary.
  • In "The Devil's Foot", Mortimer Tregennis learned from Dr. Sterndale about the titular exotic drug, which, when burned, induces crushing, irresistible terror in anyone inhaling the fumes. He then promptly stole some from the doctor and used it on his own siblings for their heritage, driving his brothers insane and killing the sister. Turned out, Dr. Sterndale was in love with said sister and got his revenge on Mortimer with a lethal dose of the same drug. After having Sterndale confess, Holmes lets him go and then comments that if he was in doctor's shoes, he'd probably do the same thing.
  • In "The Solitary Cyclist," the odious Mr. Woodley takes a swing at Holmes, who punches his lights out in response, and then is shot by his accomplice, who had a change of heart.
• The novel The Absolution, by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, deals with a serial killer at work in Reykjavik. A common theme linking the murders of several school-age teenagers is that they were the ringleaders of school gangs who brutally bullied weaker kids at school, provoking several attempted suicides and one of the victims to end up horribly physically disfigured. Even the police investigating the case agree the kids involved are unpleasant obnoxious little shits, but conclude not even they deserved to die like this. On the way, a related crime involving asshole victims emerges, of one of the bullying rings luring men into compromising positions by offering sex with underage girls - then blackmailing them when they showed up, at around $500 a time.
• Six of Crows:
  • Pekka Rollins. No one can deny he deserved serious repercussions for what he'd done to Kaz and Jordie, stealing their life savings, leaving them on the streets, which eventually led to the death of Jordie and Kaz's rebirth as the Bastard of the Barrel. Some might regard Kaz's vengeance as being a bit much, but it was probably the best option. Kaz lies to Pekka, claiming that he buried Pekka's toddler son alive, and forces Pekka to beg on his knees, trying to recall Jordie's name. Later, we learn that Pekka is having nightmares, fearing that every other person he tricked, stole from, or otherwise hurt will come back for their revenge like Kaz did. Inej doesn't help, cutting Pekka and leaving a stuffed crow in place of the toddler's stuffed lion, triggering further paranoia in Pekka.
  • The man Kaz dropped off of a building. He was a clerk who worked for a man they needed information from. The clerk after giving Kaz the information he wanted, made the mistake of offering up the services of a young prostitute who he has blackmail on. Kaz then drops the man off of the building. Not one single reader felt sorry for the guy.
  • Jan Van Eck. He's an abusive father, a shitty husband, a ruthless businessman, planning to take advantage of his advanced knowledge about parem to play the markets and make a lot of money. He also makes the mistake of double-crossing Kaz Brekker. By the end of the duology, he has lost all his money and property to his despised son Wylan, been booted from his position of power on the Merchant's Council, lost all of his credibility and power, and been jailed for fraud (a very serious crime, akin to murder, in Kerch). No one's feeling sorry for him.
• A number of the Dark Spirit's victims in A Snowball in Hell are just terrible people, such as Darren "The Daddy" McDade who is very racist and ideologically bankrupt, and a group of land mine manufacturing execs who are... well, land mine manufacturing execs. That doesn't mean that any of them deserve their ultimate fates.
• This is the reason why R. L. Stine's The Snowman doesn't necessarily work: the readers are supposed to dislike him because he's a cold-blooded killer, but his victim is a physically and emotionally abusive jerk. The victim in question has beaten his wife and niece, emotionally berated his wife so much as to break her spirit, he's stealing money from his niece's inheritance while barely leaving the rest of his family enough money to eat, and he has zero redeeming qualities. Snowman's actions after the murder indicate a lot of insanity on his part, but he was pretty justified in killing who he killed. Given how confused he was afterward about why the victim's family wouldn't be happy, and how he seems to think he's done the right thing, readers sometimes ended up liking him rather than being horrified by him. However, Snowman tricked the niece into giving him money. He told her something along the lines of his father being in the hospital undergoing an expensive operation and that he needs all the money he can get. She did not find out until much later that he lives alone and apparently has no parents Then, when he reveals that he killed her uncle, and she displayed horror, he said that he still had the money she gave him and that if she went to the police, he would just tell them that she paid him to kill her uncle.
• In Jeffrey Archer's Sons of Fortune, Nate is put on trial for killing Ralph Paton, his rival for the Republican nomination for the governor of Connecticut. A poll showed Nate's polling numbers went up, 72% didn't want him to withdraw from the race, and 7% said they would happily have killed the man for the asking.
• Spectral Shadows makes sure that readers are glad Christine Rhoades walloped Dr. Craig Reinhart in Serial 11 after hearing about how he mistreats Kacey and goes so far as to try to torment her in front of Christine not once but twice. Guy must love getting his medicine. Then there's the three representatives of the conspiring towns later on that meet their end by the Lost Ferals; they were willing to execute Princess Jenny and cause a war between two towns that would lead to other towns benefiting from said war.
• Star Trek: Ex Machina: Deconstructed in the climax, when the Big Bad kills an unpleasant government worker as a show of force. The man was previously shown to be an unthinking oppressor with not an ounce of care for the fact he was enflaming tensions, but Spock is still horrified because he's just seen some die.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Black Fleet Crisis trilogy presents not one but two Asshole Victims who take turns victimizing each other. The Empire violently oppressed the Yevetha, a bloodthirsty Always Chaotic Evil race of aliens who believe all other species are disgustingly inferior. The Yevetha violently rebelled against them, seized the Empire's ships in a bloody coup, and enslaved the surviving Imperial soldiers. The Imperial slaves later violently rose up against their Yevethan masters and stole the ships back, robbing the Yevetha of the core of their fleet and ensuring the New Republic's victory against the Yevetha. Later the brutal Yevethan dictator, Nil Spaar, is stuffed in an escape pod by the Imperials and dumped into hyperspace.
  • The New Jedi Order series follows this up by dropping a bridge on the Yevetha offscreen at the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong. The Yevetha were rearming and preparing to restart the war, so their prospective victims asked the extragalactic invaders to protect them in exchange for their surrender without a fight. The Yuuzhan Vong smashed the Yevetha fleet and glassed their homeworld.
  • Thrackan Sal-Solo, first introduced in The Corellian Trilogy. A cousin of Han Solo, he bore a strong resemblance to his famous cousin but had none of the honor that his cousin did. Among his crimes were terrorism and murder. Sal-Solo tried on a number of occasions to have his cousin and his family murdered. He was finally killed off by Boba Fett's granddaughter Mitra Gev in the Legacy of the Force book Bloodlines. Following his death, there was no shortage of Corellians wanting to claim credit for killing Sal-Solo, and Han Solo was definitely not in mourning over the death of his cousin.
    • In the novel Sacrifice very few tears are shed after Ben Skywalker assassinates Thracken's successor Dur Gejjen given how he tried to have Wedge Antilles killed and hired bounty hunters to kill Thracken, but also sets up peace talks with the intent of pulling a I Surrender, Suckers with the GFFA down the road. According to Han, Corellian security had a lot of trouble organizing all the suspects into a coherent list given how many wanted Gejjen dead.
• In Storm of Souls, no one is too upset when Brelith gets the dagger he just threw heated into molten metal and flung back into his face.
• Stray: Pufftail speculates that one of the cats rescued at an Animal Testing facility was the former cult leader Tom-Cat. The cat had his eyelids removed and was forced onto a treadmill in order to test the effects of sleeplessness.
• A Study in Charlotte: The murder victim in the first book, Lee Dobson, was an utterly horrible person who was revealed to have sexually harassed one of the characters for a year before raping her. Unfortunately, that leads to two of his most frequent victims being suspected of the crime.
• Robert Bloch's short story "Sweets to the Sweet" features an abusive father who regularly beats his daughter, blames her for her mother's Death by Childbirth, and calls her a witch. His brother isn't much better, making excuses for his behavior and not caring about the girl's suffering. So the girl studies witchcraft and makes a Voodoo Doll, then when the brother catches on and is about to take it away, lies "Why, it's only candy!" and bites off its head.
• Tails Series:
  • Tails of Fame: Rast Racklyn's first two victims are a pair of pranksters who filmed him having sex with them and later humiliated him by leaking the video online and showing the video across their college campus. No one's remotely concerned about their disappearance even a month after they're murdered.
  • Tails of the Bounty Hunter: Boris Trovmar was involved in various embezzlement schemes and even sexually harassed multiple women. No one's even slightly upset when Milz Dillvor assassinates him.
  • Tails of the Space Gladiators: In chapter 3, a dozen inmates are in the process of being transferred into the Gladiator Detention Facility, and one of them openly brags that he's a serial killer who murdered fifteen humans and consumed their brains. One of the guards wastes no time activating his Explosive Leash immediately afterwards.
• In Tales of the Frog Princess, the Swamp Fairy curses the beautiful Princess Hazel, first Green Witch, that if she or any of her female ancestors ever touch a flower they will turn into evil, ugly old hags. It has disastrous consequences for Emma and her family a few hundred years later, but when she travels back in time and actually meets Hazel, she realizes that while she's powerful, she is only interested in flowers, not really helping the kingdom (overtaking the castle with plants til it’s hard to defend), is 'always dropping hints that she could' actually hurt someone with magic, scaring her parents enough to let her walk all over them, and using magic just to be cruel to her little sister. Not to mention she's spoiled, bossy, extremely vain, and rude to people's faces for no reason. And when she falls under the curse she just gets worse.
• Tales of the Pack: Brian, a Jerk Jock and rapist, is mauled to death by a werewolf, who eats his body.
• In the Andrew Vachss Burke book Terminal, it turns out that Melissa Turnbridge, the girl whose death Burke is supposed to investigate, was a sexually abusive Fille Fatale. The perpetrators had only meant to Break the Haughty by raping her, not kill her outright.
• A Thousand Splendid Suns has Rasheed, a foul-tempered, smug, and heartless man who marries a 15-year-old girl before promptly raping her and tricks a 14-year-old girl into marrying him after the girl's family died by rockets. He abuses his wives on a frequent basis, such as forcing one of them to eat pebbles, locking one up in a shed for trying to run away, and strangling and beating them. He also shows little sympathy for his deceased son, probably because of drunken neglect. Eventually, one of the wives has put up with his abuse and retaliates by using a shovel to kill him. Considering that he follows the rules of the Taliban, you're inclined to cheer for his death instead of mourning him.
• You are meant to cheer for Tonya's father in A Time to Kill when he kills her rapists. By the end of the trial, almost everyone in the town is happy that he gets acquitted. Well, everyone but the Ku Klux Klan, but it's suggested that it isn't certain that the KKK is entirely an exception. An early scene in the book has the victims' families asking the KKK for help, and the KKK members are thinking, "We shouldn't let a black man get away with killing white people, but frankly these guys had it coming." If you've got the KKK at least partially rooting for your murderer and your murderer is a black person, that's when you know you're not the most popular guy around.
• To Kill a Mockingbird: The biggest asshole is Bob Ewell. After an innocent black man is killed escaping from prison after being framed for the rape of Ewell's daughter and despite his victory over the black man's defense attorney Atticus Finch, Ewell swears revenge on Finch for exposing what a scumbag he was at the trial. In the end, he tries to murder Atticus' two children, only to get killed himself in the ensuing struggle by the reclusive Boo Radley. Even though it is obvious he died at Boo's hands, the sheriff argues with Atticus about the prudence and morals of letting this be publicly known; ironically, he's certain nearly everyone's sympathies would be with Boo but thinks it would be cruel to go breaking his solitude by holding him up to everyone's praise and gratitude when Boo Radley really does just want to be left alone. Atticus eventually accepts the sheriff's story that Ewell killed himself by falling on his own knife. The extent of Ewell's assholishness is lampshaded in the novel, where it's noted that not only does he hold a grudge against everyone involved in the case, he was too much of a Dirty Coward to face those people directly. Besides Atticus, he tries to break into the home of the judge, in the middle of the night and stalks the black man's widow as she goes to work until her boss threatens to have him arrested for it. It's even implied that Ewell may have raped his daughter.
• T.O.T.: Toby and his gang are all shot in the head by Maximus Slade, but all three of them were vandals and shameless bullies. Sheriff Umberton and Tully are also violently killed in the penultimate chapter, but given that they intentionally ignored phone calls from the Green Water division and later tried to cover up the massacre there, they deserved it.
• Touch (2017) offers a deconstruction in the Lee interlude, where James' rapist is burned alive for what he did. It's presented in a fairly sobering light.
• In The Twilight Saga, Edward Cullen spent his early vampire years feeding off human murderers, rapists, and other serious criminals before restricting himself to animal blood. This is heinous enough to make him think he's a monster and give him something to angst about but not horrible enough to scare off his love interest Bella or his fangirls.
• This trope is used a few times in Under Suspicion:
  • There are two notable cases in I've Got You Under My Skin:
    • It becomes evident that Betsy Bonner Powell was not a pleasant woman; she was vain, greedy and selfish with a cruel streak, and enjoyed manipulating other people for her own gain. She harmed all the suspects in one way or another, and the only person who appears genuinely heartbroken by her murder is her husband. Everyone else privately thinks that it's not surprising someone whacked Betsy and they're not sorry she's dead.
    • Robert Powell is fatally struck in the head with a stray bullet when the cops confront Blue Eyes (the other main antagonist). As by this point Robert had been revealed to be a dreadful person who was just as guilty as Betsy of helping ruin people's lives (perhaps worst of all was sexually abusing his stepdaughter and driving a friend to suicide after ruining him financially) and was in all likelihood going to get away with it, no one is sorry he died like he did save for Muriel Craig (mostly because she's now lost her Meal Ticket).
  • The Cinderella Murder: After Martin Collins throws him under the bus to cover up his involvement in his crimes, Steve Roman breaks into Martin's house, waits for him to come home and then shoots him twice before turning the gun on himself. Martin ends up surviving, just, which means he can go straight to prison for racketeering, child sex abuse and various other crimes. No one is remotely sympathetic about him being shot and in fact, the emergency services being called to his home enabled them to find evidence of his crimes.
  • In You Don't Own Me, the more we learn about murder victim Martin Bell, the harder it becomes to feel much sympathy for him. Beyond his positive public facade and his parents' rose-tinted view of him, he was controlling, manipulative and egotistical with a dash of misogyny. It's strongly implied he duped his patients into taking a cocktail of painkillers that turned them into "zombies" while touting himself as a miracle worker. He was especially cruel to his long-suffering wife, having no empathy for her mental health struggles, getting her hooked on pills and making her out to be crazy. While his killer doesn't exactly come across as a Sympathetic Murderer, Leigh Ann killed Martin because he demanded she leave her husband for him and become an adoring, docile housewife and stepmother, threatening to tell her husband and the media about their affair if she refused. His widow's first response to his murder was relief she was "free" of him and even the family's nanny admits his wife and children are much happier without him around.
• Vengeance and Beyond begins with the abandonment of the prosecution of an asshole boyfriend for the rape-murder of his girlfriend. He was innocent of the crime, a victim of prosecution. In jail awaiting trial, he was the victim of intense coercive police interrogation and attacks by fellow inmates. Subverted in that he, his attorney, and various others who aided him are sent back by Mental Time Travel to the victim's body, to experience the crime themselves, and consequently prevent the murder although not the brutal rape, and get the actual rapists brought to justice.
• Wasp (1957): Throughout the novel, the protagonist, Mowry, an Agent Provocateur on an alien planet, kills two agents of the Kaitempi—the Sirian State Sec known for their sadism and brutality. The latter victim also kicks the dog some time before the murder by beating and kicking an old man.
• While My Pretty One Sleeps:
  • Downplayed and ultimately subverted with Ethel Lambston. Neeve acknowledges that Ethel wasn't the easiest person to get along with: she was a nosy chatterbox who could be insensitive to others, had a vengeful streak, and enjoyed stirring up trouble and provoking people. Her treatment of her ex-husband and his family in particular stands out as one of her most unpleasant actions. However, Neeve adds that Ethel was an honest and hardworking woman who called it as she saw it and wasn't afraid to expose corruption and lies. It's also made evident Ethel was a very lonely person who had been let down by the people she loved, giving her a degree of sympathy. Neeve is genuinely upset about Ethel's murder and even though Ethel wasn't well-liked, most people are still shocked by her brutal death; Ruth despised Ethel but even she is disturbed by the thought her husband could've potentially killed her. Ethel's murderer also killed her for purely selfish reasons: she was going to expose him as having stolen his career-making fashion designs from Neeve's mother (and she may have been close to figuring out he also killed Neeve's mother to cover it up).
  • Denny Adler likely isn't going to be missed by anyone, given he was a murderer and all-round scumbag, including killing homeless people to rob them of what little they had because he thinks no one will miss them, and trying to kill Neeve Kearny for money, especially as she's only ever been kind to him. That being said, Neeve is still horrified that Sal killed Denny without giving him a chance to surrender, even knowing he intended to kill her.
• The Wolf Gift features a variety of Werewolves known as Morphenkinder who have the ability to sense evil in people, and are compelled to kill whoever it exudes from. Because of this, the ones they kill always are awful human beings who got their gruesome demise coming.
• In A World Less Visible, you can be forgiven for being upset Sima's death isn't horrible enough.
• Worm:
  • The first people that the Slaughterhouse Nine (Superpowered Psychopaths) attack in the city are The Merchants, a gang of violent, drug dealing assholes.
  • Bakuda is an unrepentant Mad Bomber. In her backstory she held her university hostage for giving her a less than perfect grade. She goes on to implant bombs in innocents and carry out an indiscriminate Brockton Bay-wide bombing spree. When she meets her end, no one weeps.
• One of the cruellest acts committed by Ray in Worst. Person. Ever., has him stressing a fat airline passenger to a fatal heart attack. However, given the man was a horrid boss to his employees, his death goes unmourned.

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