Betrayed/traitor hero stories

[moonfly7]

I'm looking for books where the main character begins the story either as a hero betrayed by his allies, or considered to be a traitor. Or both. Basically the "broken hero on the run" kind of feel.

[Dienekes]

Logan Ninefingers and his crew of The First Law trilogy are at first presented as characters who were unjustly exiled by Logan’s best friend/king and then hunted by said king and his minions.

At least originally. That part of the story remains important but the feel of a hunted hero does take a back seat as the characters get wrapped up in Wizard politics and war.

Though it should also be noted that the author loves twisting and subverting tropes, so if you want this sort of story played straight I’d look elsewhere.

[Kitten Champion]

Two of the bigger ones from the world of Isekai are Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari and Arifureta Shokugyou de Sekai Saikyou. Both have their summoned-from-another-world heroes betrayed and left on their own to become angst-ridden and absolutely overpowered. In the case of Arifureta the hero is tossed to a bottom of a labyrinth after a jealous ally used the life-or-death situation to attempt to secretly murder him, while in Tate no Yuusha the kingdom which summoned him hated the protagonist's Shielder class - for reasons that apparently get explained much later - and falsely accuse him of sexual assault to justify spurning him entirely.

Hataraku Maou-sama! is another in it's own way. Emilia, the hero, is hailed as humanity's only hope against the Demon King and his armies. While she failed to kill him she did succeed in banishing him and herself to our Earth where she agonizes over whether she should finally kill him or not. We learn later that the religious power that backed her and humanity's war-effort against the demons is pretty self-serving and corrupt, such that they plotted to assassinate her secretly as she's an inconvenience to their monopolizing power after the war.

[moonfly7]

Two of the bigger ones from the world of Isekai are Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari and Arifureta Shokugyou de Sekai Saikyou. Both have their summoned-from-another-world heroes betrayed and left on their own to become angst-ridden and absolutely overpowered. In the case of Arifureta the hero is tossed to a bottom of a labyrinth after a jealous ally used the life-or-death situation to attempt to secretly murder him, while in Tate no Yuusha the kingdom which summoned him hated the protagonist's Shielder class - for reasons that apparently get explained much later - and falsely accuse him of sexual assault to justify spurning him entirely.

Hataraku Maou-sama! is another in it's own way. Emilia, the hero, is hailed as humanity's only hope against the Demon King and his armies. While she failed to kill him she did succeed in banishing him and herself to our Earth where she agonizes over whether she should finally kill him or not. We learn later that the religious power that backed her and humanity's war-effort against the demons is pretty self-serving and corrupt, such that they plotted to assassinate her secretly as she's an inconvenience to their monopolizing power after the war.

Huh. I read and absolutely loved shield hero so I'll check out the others.

[Lurkmoar]

Crest of the Stars. The viewpoint human character is considered a quisling. Side note, I dislike the Abh so much, I root for the United Humankind faction, which is an actual 'bad guy' in this universe.

A bit similar to what happened in Avatar the James Cameron movie. The 'heroes' aren't very likable and the bad guy has charisma or at least some PRESENCE.

[JNAProductions]

The Icarus Hunt, by Timothy Zahn. The main character is a disgraced military official, court-martialed and relegated to being a low-down cargo hauler to get by.

[jh12]

Robert Ludlum has some books that would seem to fit the bill. There are probably more Lublum books as well, but these were the ones that popped to mind.

For the broken hero on the run, you have The Bourne Identity (although we're not sure he's a hero at the time).

Spoiler: The Bourne Identity

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Who is Jason Bourne? Is he an assassin, a terrorist, a thief? Why has he got four million dollars in a Swiss bank account? Why has someone tried to murder him?...

Jason Bourne does not know the answer to any of these questions. Suffering from amnesia, he does not even know that he is Jason Bourne. What manner of man is he? What are his secrets? Who has he killed?

For the betrayed hero, there's The Parsifal Mosaic.

Spoiler: The Parsifal Mosaic

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Michael Havelock's world ended on a moonlit beach on the Costa Brava. He stood by and watched as his partner and lover, Jenna Karas, double agent, was coldly and efficiently gunned down by his own agency. There's nothing left for Havelock but to get out, quit the game. Until, in one frantic moment on a crowded railway platform in Rome, Havelock sees Jenna. She's alive - and suddenly Havelock is a marked man, on the run from both US and Russian assassins. a massive mosaic of treachery created by a top-level mole with the world in his fist - Parsifal.

Then there's the Brotherhood of the Rose by David Morrell, but I think there might have been a bit more of a build up to the betrayal rather than starting right off.

Spoiler: The Brotherhood of the Rose

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Chris and Saul were orphans - raised in a Philadelphia school for boys, bonded by friendship and devoted to a mysterious man called Eliot. He visited them and brought them sweets. He treated them like sons. He trained them to be assassins.

Now he is trying to have them killed.

Or The Innocent by David Baldacci.

Spoiler: The Innocent

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America has enemies - ruthless people that the police, the FBI, even the military can't stop. That's when the U.S. government calls on Will Robie, a stone cold hitman who never questions orders and always nails his target. But Will Robie may have just made the first - and last - mistake of his career...

It begins with a hit gone wrong. Robie is dispatched to eliminate a target unusually close to home in Washington, D.C. But something about this mission doesn't seem right to Robie, and he does the unthinkable. He refuses to kill. Now, Robie becomes a target himself and must escape from his own people.

Fleeing the scene, Robie crosses paths with a wayward teenage girl, a fourteen-year-old runaway from a foster home. But she isn't an ordinary runaway -- her parents were murdered, and her own life is in danger. Against all of his professional habits, Robie rescues her and finds he can't walk away. He needs to help her.

Even worse, the more Robie learns about the girl, the more he's convinced she is at the center of a vast cover-up, one that may explain her parents' deaths and stretch to unimaginable levels of power.

Now, Robie may have to step out of the shadows in order to save this girl's life... and perhaps his own.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

The Dragonback series by Timothy Zahn. The first book, Dragon and Thief, kicks off with deuteragonist uno arriving to colonize a new planet... only to realize they've been betrayed and their genocidal enemies are already there waiting for them. Draycos is the only survivor of the ship crash, and as a symbiote, will perish within six hours unless he finds a new host. With seconds to spare, he takes a chance on...

Jack, a former thief who went legitimate before being set up and betrayed for reasons unknown to him. He's on the run from the police, hiding out on a backwater planet in the middle of nowhere when an enormous spaceship fight and subsequent crash livens up his day. While exploring the wreckage for anything valuable, he gets more than he bargained for when a tiger-sized alien pounces on him and becomes essentially a living tattoo.

The two forge an unlikely alliance and friendship over helping with each others betrayals, and treachery and trust remain a common theme throughout the series.


The Green & the Grey, also by Zahn, probably counts, too. The main characters are, at gunpoint, given a child to take care of. She is Melathia Green, and she's the one who's either been betrayed or is the betrayer depending on how you look at it, and is now being hunted. Can't really go any further into the details without giving important stuff away.

[LibraryOgre]

Logan Ninefingers and his crew of The First Law trilogy are at first presented as characters who were unjustly exiled by Logan’s best friend/king and then hunted by said king and his minions.

At least originally. That part of the story remains important but the feel of a hunted hero does take a back seat as the characters get wrapped up in Wizard politics and war.

Though it should also be noted that the author loves twisting and subverting tropes, so if you want this sort of story played straight I’d look elsewhere.

Related to this is Abercrombie's "Best Served Cold" where, in the first few pages, the main character's brother is murdered and she, herself, barely escapes it. The rest of the book is a tale of her discovery and revenge.

[Traab]

Im not sure if this counts as it takes a bit to reach the betrayal but The Outstretched Shadow is the first book of a trilogy where the main character starts out as the son of the ruler of a city of mages, and eventually he gets banished into the wilds and the second half of the book and the two that follow are what happens to him afterward. It was a pretty good fantasy series imo, but then, im a fan of mercedes lackey anyways.

[J-H]

The Black Cipher, a 20 or 30 year old novel. The protagonist is a British SIGINT spook or programmer or something. He spots a repeated encrypted transmission that has some distinct characteristics, and notices that it's getting deleted or covered up by MI-4 or MI-6 or whoever it is he's working for. He goes rogue trying to run it down, financing his play by card-counting at blackjack and going around the world to get recorded copies of the transmission so that he can code-break it.

Fun book, would read again if I found it at the library.

[jh12]

Lee Goldberg, True Fiction (although it's pretty funny)

Spoiler

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When a passenger jet crashes onto the beaches of Waikiki, bestselling thriller writer Ian Ludlow knows the horrific tragedy wasn't an accident.

Years before, the CIA enlisted Ian to dream up terrorism scenarios to prepare the government for nightmares they couldn't imagine. Now one of those schemes has come true, and Ian is the only person alive who knows how it was done...and who is behind the plot. That makes him too dangerous to live.

Ian goes on the run, sweeping up an innocent bystander in his plight--Margo French, a dog walker and aspiring singer. They are pursued by assassins and an all-seeing global-intelligence network that won't stop until Ian and Margo are dead. Ian has written thrillers like this before, but this time he doesn't know how it's going to end--or if he will be alive to find out.

[Wraith]

Eisenhorn and Ravenor; both are trilogies, wherein the latter is/was the pupil of the former.

Set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Eisenhorn is a straight-laced, almost Puritan Inquisitor who gets embroiled in a plot against the Imperium, and he slowly embarks on a downward spiral into betrayal, murder, heresy and sorcery as he goes to ever increasing lengths to expose and punish the villain. By the end of it he has been declared renegade, has had virtually all of his staff either killed or turn on him, and he has to go on the run because even if there were forgiveness for what he's done, he doesn't know who he can trust to actually explain himself.

Ravenor is similar; an Inquisitor who pursues an incredibly dangerous recidivist and along the way is betrayed half a dozen times and appears to be going the same way as Eisenhorn, but right at the end he pulls back from the brink and just about keeps his reputation intact. He is ultimately victorious but the circumstances ends his career and he's left alienated from his allies and constantly under the shadow of his heretical mentor.

[aguaracu]

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. The main character is the only survivor of a disastrous first contact with aliens and the blame for this makes him infamous on his return to earth. His fellow Jesuits are nursing him back to health and the story of the expedition is told in flashback.
I only realised that there is a sequel when I looked the book up to make sure I got the title and author right. I shall read that, thanks OP!

Transition by Iain Banks. The main character is an agent for a timeline-hopping society but suspicion and betrayal are in the air...

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. The main character is one of the 'Gods' but is opposed to them. One of the classics of science fiction. The Chronicles of Amber might also qualify, the first book at least.

If you're looking for spy novels then maybe a John le Carré book? A Perfect Spy more or less meets your criteria and is very good.