I'm very nearly finished a hist/rom which is GREAT but it has one of the *itchiest *itches I've ever read in a book - she is so nasty you can't wait for her to get her comeuppance. I work in mental heath so I should know what her DX is but I do know she's passive-aggressive along with heaven knows what else. She's a real piece of work.

What book(s) have you read that contained a real witch you wanted to throttle? who made lots of trouble before people caught on to her?

No major spoilers, please, but this woman is the worst I've read in a romance, ever.

Gail

That's one nice thing about Catherine Coulter - her other women are often very sympathetic. They are usually professional mistresses with hearts of gold. :-)  I tend not to like plots with other women who are really awful, they just make the hero look bad, IMO.

You want an exceptionally awful woman character, try Linda Howard's.... Shades of Twilight? Oh man, that iis one gross book.

I'm reading one right now and its the heroine's MOTHER!  I swear I just want  the girl to disown her.

I've read a gazillion of these and can't think of many right now.  Obviously not one of my fav themes either.  I'm like Willa - it doesn't put the hero in a very good light to have this sort of woman (hopefully) in his past:P  I'm thinking Woodiwiss, more often than not, has the former mistress/thwarted would-be wife hanging around & doing her best to muck up the romance.

the girls mother in Sunset Bay drove me insane..actually didn't care for her stupid sister either..she wasn't quite as bad later but the mother I wanted dead!

I'm not usually a big fan of these either.  The one that pops into my head, though is a kepper, Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas. 

I know y'all won't want to hear this... My favorite itch is the model/actress in Diana Palmer's Lawless. She becomes the heroine in a subsequent title, Renegade.

Isn't redemption wonderful?

Colleen

The wicked *itch thing isn't a theme I'd look into consciously but I only posted this topic because I'd never read a book that had such a nasty female character in it  - bad guys, yes, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised that books have female nasties in them.

I'm so used to "the other woman" - the hero's ex-wife, or ex-girlfriend, or co-worker who has the hots for him - but the character in this hist/rom wasn't an "other woman" in the way we think of them; she was the hero's SIL and was unbelievable. At the end of the book I thought for sure she'd totally gone over the edge into madness but to the bitter end she was pathologically lying, trying to manipulate everyone.

I'd dying to share the things she did but they would be major spoilers for the book. The only other psychopatic female character I've read is an old Naomi Hintze gothic (or rom/suspense) - she was the heroine's MIL and did everything she could to literally destroy the heroine. Put me off Hintze forever - wasn't sure if this was a recurring theme in her books or not, didn't want to take the chance.

Gail - now reading a tra Regency, much lighter fare!

Colleen - that's the only thing that has kept me from reading Renegade!  I loved the hero but couldn't stand to think of him with that *itch!

Why is it that a the bad guy - or a troublesome secondary male character - can be redeemed in a spin-off and we like him, yet the reverse isn't always true? It's sometimes hard to think that the bad woman (I keep wanting to write the "b" word which has a stronger emphasis) can be redeemed (once a B, always a B - why not once an s.o.b., always an s.o.b.?

I once read a Medieval hist/rom that had a bad knight who was hired to do something foul to the heroine to keep her from marrying the hero, etc., and he (bad guy) had a change of heart and didn't follow through at the end but all through the book you knew things would turn out well, but would the bad guy be found out and killed? I always hoped the author would write a companion book to give this knight his own HEA but she never did.

Really nasty characters I can more easily handle in non-romances - in roms that kind of stress and bad vibes does a number on me.

Gail

That is something I actually like about Palmer (gasp!) -- that she sometimes redeems her nasty women. Like the mother in True Colors repents, too.

Mary Balogh has turned at least one villainess into a heroine. She may be one of the few writers who can pull it off. :-)

Gail, so what is the book you spoke of in the first post?

Karen - the book is Kasey Michaels' Regency-set hist/rom, The Illusions Of Love.

I haven't read any of her other big books (only her trad Regencies) so I don't know if she has a habit of including witchy women as secondary characters.

Gail

When I read Falling for Gracie by Susan Mallery....I wanted to throw the book against the wall because of all the people that were mean to Gracie, her mother, the other woman, her sisters.....I loved Gracie, be nice, haha.

The second sister in Mallory's "Sweet" series was pretty obnoxious. One of those people who has to blame everything that goes wrong in their life on someone.