Anonymous wrote:After a string of good books about deeply unlikable people, I'm reading The Marlow Murder Club about a crabby elderly lady solving her neighbor's murder with a crew of quirky townspeople. It's fun.

I guess yeah - cozy mysteries and romances tend to have pretty likable characters. Except I always end up hating everyone in a romance - I'm coming to learn that genre is not for me.

^ And actually one of the only romances where I did like the characters was The Rosie Project - main character is a professor on the spectrum going about finding the perfect wife in a totally stupid way, and ending up in a relationship with a woman who isn't what he's looking for at all. Pretty much everyone in the book is likable (except a lot of DCUM may not like one of the male characters, who's constantly cheating on his wife).

After a string of good books about deeply unlikable people, I'm reading The Marlow Murder Club about a crabby elderly lady solving her neighbor's murder with a crew of quirky townspeople. It's fun.

I guess yeah - cozy mysteries and romances tend to have pretty likable characters. Except I always end up hating everyone in a romance - I'm coming to learn that genre is not for me.

Anonymous wrote:Dear Mrs. Bird and its two sequels. There will be a fourth book in the series coming out in August,
It is about a young woman in England who gets a job working for a magazine during WW II.

Oh I liked these books as well! Happy to know there is another one coming.

Fantasy book series, so not many here will like it, but Royce and Hadrian are my likeable guys. I often wonder what they're up to!

The the author, Michael Sullivan, writes all the books in a series first and then releases, so you're not left with a Game of Throne situation or a Patrick Rothfuss debacle.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10790290-theft-of-swords?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=n3Ak03aOaK&rank=1

Not new, but I enjoyed Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. Also, the Thursday Murder Club series (even the villains were likable!).

That’s one of the reasons I started reading romance- the characters are almost always likable.

I also like mysteries written by romance writers. They are often not romance (some are and others not so much).

If you like historical mysteries, Jennifer Ashley’s Below Stairs series is great. Similar with Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series. For contemporary books, I like Kelley Armstrong’s Rockton series and Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age.

Dear Mrs. Bird and its two sequels. There will be a fourth book in the series coming out in August,
It is about a young woman in England who gets a job working for a magazine during WW II.

What are your most likable characters?
I’ve read too many with unlikeable characters recently.

Unlikeable is fun, because it’s less straightforward, is a source of conflict, etc.

But I want some likable people for a while.

-Recently published or read.
-Or all-time favorites (though, maybe many of us have already read them)