I just got a series of brief Facebook messages from a reader who is also an internet friend. She won my “get your name in a story” contest last year (her name is Holly Jahangiri), and ended up starring in the short story, “By the Book“. The idea behind that story was to promote the novel, FORCE OF HABIT, and Holly is now reading it.
She talks about Pel Darzin, the cop in the story and the book, as if he were really really real, which is nifty enough, but then came this series of messages about two of the bad guys:
Holly: Oddly, I kind of like Morgan and Foy.
Me: Good! I like them, too. 
Holly: I think that shows.
Connell Morgan is a con-man from Earth making a precarious living on the planet Llannonn by, among other things, selling Earth names to Llannonninn with a taste for the exotic. He kidnaps Our Heroine, Bel Schuster, under the mistaken impression she’s a VIP he can ransom for immunity and passage off the planet.
Eddie Foy, Jr. is a Llannonninn petty criminal who met Morgan when Morgan caught him trying to steal some of Morgan’s papers with names on them. He’s willing to broker Bel into slavery if she doesn’t arrange for Morgan’s demands to be met.
It’s true that there are people–and I’ve written people–who have psychologies and motivations so alien to me I find it difficult to recognize the humanity, let alone the divine, in them. But I much prefer human bad guys of whatever planetary origin, bad guys you can like, even while you’re glad you don’t actually have to deal with them.
Marian Allen
Fantasies, mysteries, comedies, recipes
Pingback: MARIAN ALLEN · Friday Recommends – Anthropology and All That