Five top novels with tantalizing anti-heroes

Taylor Hutton is the pseudonym of a pair of writer friends, one of whom has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award and the other who is a New York Times bestselling author and Edgar Award finalist. Between the two of them, they have written over forty books. When they are not passing their latest sexy thriller back and forth on Google Doc, they are browsing bookstores, sending each other ridiculous memes, walking their dogs Trudy and Potato around their Los Angeles neighborhood, and making their children cringe with their TikTok videos.

Their new novel is Strike and Burn.

At CrimeReads the authors tagged five novels in which "readers can’t help but find themselves occasionally rooting for the dark side." One title on the list:

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Like [Jean Hanff Korelitz's] The Book Series, Yellowface is an anti-hero story about a novelist appropriating and stealing another writer’s work (in this case a white woman stealing a book written by an Asian American woman about the Chinese Labor Corp) and passing it off as their own. At times a fun satiric inside-baseball skewering of the publishing industry, it’s also an exploration of white privilege, discrimination, cultural appropriation and professional envy. Kuang uses first person present tense to take us right into the mind of our unreliable narrator, and like all the books above, half the fun is the squeamishness and disgust we feel at the shamelessness of our anti-hero–as one of many examples, she takes on a pen name that misleads readers into thinking she’s Chinese. This literary thriller–like most of the best anti-hero novels–makes the reader compulsively turn the pages while simultaneously making us reach for the Costco size bottle of Tums.

Read about another novel on the list.

Yellowface is among Elizabeth Staple's eight books about youthful mistakes that come back to haunt you, Lauren Kuhl's eight top novels about toxic relationships, Elly Griffiths's top ten books about books, Toby Lloyd's seven books that show storytelling has consequences, Sophie Wan's seven top titles with women behaving badly, Leah Konen's six top friends-to-frenemies thrillers, and Garnett Cohen's seven novels about characters driven by their cravings.

--Marshal Zeringue