The ‘Maverick Friend’ As a Plot Device

By Bonnie Randall

Part of the How They Do It Series (Monthly Contributor)

If you have watched Harlan Coben’s Safe or The Five, you are familiar with the ‘Maverick Friend’, a character employed within many of Coben’s mysteries. The Maverick Friend is often someone who is ‘situationally ethical’; the virtues they have are often buried beneath the shocking things they do…or are what propel the wicked things they do. Maverick Friends are not the stories’ villains, yet they cheat, steal, lie, drink, use dope, sleep around, and sometimes even commit murder.

The Maverick Friend is often used as the character who can employ the vigilante-type violence a plot may require when such a resolution, if affected by the main protagonist, would be unbecoming, unacceptable, unbelievable, or would derail the story’s HEA. In my novel Divinity & the Python , it was crucial that neither my heroine nor my hero become killers, yet my villain needed to die. Enter my heroine’s ‘Maverick Friend’ who was, without HEA-derailing consequences, able to inflict the final act of violence that stopped evil in its tracks.

Read more »Written by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com