Books Like Assistant to the Villain

More evil bosses with benefits that vary by employer.

Evie Sage needs a paycheck. The Villain needs an assistant who can ask politely about the corpse on her desk. When someone starts sabotaging his operation, Evie has a job to save and a boss she can’t stop thinking about.

If you miss watching Evie keep her manners under those working conditions, start with a villain who’s had enough of the job. If you mostly wanted her and the boss to stop pretending, there’s a Victorian thief who can make a death threat sound like flirting.

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01
The Demon Overlord's Retirement Plan
by M. H. Foster
Galornus Prime talks about being killed by heroes with the weary precision of someone going over old performance reviews. He’s had enough of it. As Willem Porter, he intends to grow turnips and keep his powers quiet, which gets harder when officials and merchants threaten his new village. He also has a goat named Prometheus who sees no reason to defer to him.
This is our closest match for the way Evie makes a gruesome job sound ordinary. The village pace is gentler, though Galornus did take his new body from a man who had no say in it.
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02
Dreadful
by Caitlin Rozakis
Gav wakes up with no memory and finds out he’s an evil wizard. There’s a princess he apparently kidnapped, and his goblin servants are waiting for him to act like their boss. Pick this one if you’d like to watch the person in charge quietly panic about what everyone thinks he already knows.
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03
How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying
by Django Wexler
Davi keeps dying in her attempts to save humanity. Each time she wakes up at the start, so this time she goes after the Dark Lord’s job. She figures a lot of what people call charisma comes down to how many armed followers show up.
Save this one for when you want the bloodier version of the joke. It has graphic torture, suicide, self-harm, discussion of sexual assault, and frequent swearing.
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04
The House Witch
by Delemhach
Take the slow romance to a royal kitchen. Finlay Ashowan wants to cook and keep his domestic magic to himself, but knights keep turning up on kitchen duty and he can’t leave well enough alone with Annika. Their courtship proceeds by traded jabs. Kraken, his kitten familiar, gets chapters of his own.
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05
The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association
by Caitlin Rozakis
The kindergarten supply list calls for a whetstone. Vivian is new to all of this, thanks to the werewolf who bit her daughter. Then there’s the request for volunteers to provide class sacrifices, with a note ruling out animals. Anyone who liked watching Evie work out what counted as normal at her new job should recognize Vivian’s problem.
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06
The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels
by India Holton
An assassination attempt is good news for Cecilia. It might persuade the senior ladies in her Victorian society of thieves to take her seriously. Ned, who has orders to kill her, has an inconvenient attraction to her as well. At one point the two politely return the things they’ve stolen from each other.
This is where we’d go for the flirting. The violence, including murder, is non-graphic, and there’s a sex scene on the page.
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07
The Kaiju Preservation Society
by John Scalzi
Jamie Gray’s old boss tried to sell a firing as an opportunity. An animal rights organization actually offers one, so now Jamie has to lift heavy things and serve conference snacks for a team that works on a parallel Earth. The new coworkers are good for a sarcastic remark, and the wildlife comes with its own nuclear reactors.
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08
We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
by Dennis E. Taylor
Bob’s new employer is a government that can switch him off. He’s an AI tasked with finding habitable planets, and when he starts making copies of himself, he discovers they have their own opinions. Go here for engineering problems and coworkers who name themselves Riker and Homer.
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09
The Good Fairies of New York
by Martin Millar
The wildcard takes us to Manhattan, where a fairy named Heather throws up on Dinnie and his carpet. She assures him fairy vomit smells nice to humans.
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