John Scalzi's Starter Villain is a sweet standalone fiction novel. The protagonist is a down-on-his-luck everyman, currently feeling sad about his divorce and scraping by with substitute teaching. When his longtime-estranged uncle dies, he hears about it first on the news and then in a very real way when his uncle's estate reaches out to ask him to host the funeral... and then sucks him into the wacky, fast-moving world of a series of comedy and action-adventure tropes. It turns out that his uncle was a supervillain, and he stands to inherit a vast empire of cool/profitable/evil(?) companies.
Scalzi is excellent at writing zippy dialog and action scenes. This book was an easy and fun read (it distracted me from three days of migraines). I'd recommend it as summer beach reading, particularly for cat lovers.
This post's theme word is pecksniff (n), "a person who pretends to have high moral principles." The convocation of villains featured many pecksniffs.
