I love a good bad guy. Who doesn’t? One of my favorite bad guys is Colonel Miles Quaritch from Avatar. I can’t help but smile when he comes on the screen.

Before we get to him, I wanted to tell you where my love of bad guys came from. It’s not so much as love, but rather a fascination. I love mysteries and real detective shows, but for me it’s not about the chase, but who the killer is and the questions: why did they do it? what made them get to that place? Those questions are what lured me to writing romantic suspense, a genre I never thought I’d write despite my love of mysteries (huge Nancy Drew fan as a kid).

So, back to the bad guy in Avatar. Under normal circumstances if a villain scowled it would seem ridiculous, but our guy here does it and does it with a style and a bravado that says, “Yea I did it. You got a problem with that?!” How cool is that? In addition to scowling, he has some great scenes. My favorites are:

When they’re escaping in the helicopter and he goes out to the platform without an oxygen mask and starts shooting at them. He stands there and waits for someone to bring him a mask. Is that ballsy or what?

It’s the highpoint of the fight and his plane is on fire and about to explode. He jumps into the mechanical armor suit and out the plane and calmly pats his shoulder like it’s merely a pesky fly he swatting away instead of his shoulder on fire. I can’t help but smile and think, “You the man!”

When the bad guy from my current book, Deadly Bloodlines started talking to me and telling me his story I tried to brush him aside. It wasn’t his story, it was my heroine’s, but the more he talked to me, the more I realized I liked him and wanted him to have a point of view, something I’d never done before.

It posed a problem for me because I didn’t want people to know his identity. I like readers to guess the killer’s identity and then guess wrong, rather than know it upfront and try to catch him. How did I write his POV without giving away his identity? Thankfully a lightbulb went off on how to make it work. I want readers to get to know him, understand him, hate him, and then say, “Damn, I didn’t think it was him!” cause that’s how I roll! LOL!

Now it’s your turn to share. HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR BAD GUYS? WHAT ABOUT THEM MAKES THEM SPECIAL?