A reading stack by Cheri Krueger
Three antiheroes you should never trust.
A professional hospital visitor. A loan shark with movie ideas. Scarlett O’Hara.
An antihero does not need to be good. The reader only needs a reason to keep watching.
Cheri Krueger chose three protagonists with appetite, nerve, and a talent for bending a room around themselves. Their openings show how humor, competence, and sheer force of personality can outrun good judgment.
About the recommenderCheri Krueger is the author of The Abduction of Adrienne Berg, a thriller about a Marin wife whose imagined violence begins to feel possible.
01
A Man With One of Those Faces
Caimh McDonnell · 2015
Classic “fish out of water” main character whose snarky humor makes me laugh out loud.
Cheri Krueger
Why the opening works
Paul visits dying strangers because they mistake him for someone else. The absurd arrangement is funny, but the tenderness underneath it keeps him from becoming only a joke.
02
Get Shorty
Elmore Leonard · 1990
Fast paced and hilarious crime thriller with top notch dialogue.
Cheri Krueger
Why the opening works
Chili Palmer’s stolen leather jacket becomes a matter of principle. Leonard reveals menace through dialogue and restraint, letting competence do the seducing.
03
Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell · 1936
Scarlett is the type of main character you love to hate. Driven, ambitious, ruthless. Admire her but don’t trust her.
Cheri Krueger
Why the opening works
Scarlett is introduced through contradiction: not beautiful, yet impossible for the twins to see clearly. The opening turns force of personality into the book’s first event.
04
The Abduction of Adrienne Berg
Cheri Krueger
A suffocating Marin wife fantasizes about murder and meets her husband's pilot.
The book behind the stack
Why the opening works
The apparent murder becomes a trowel entering soil, but the fantasy is vivid enough to leave a stain. The feint introduces both Adrienne’s confinement and the danger in her imagination.