Good Guy, Bad Guy?

Is your main character a good guy or a bad guy or somewhere inbetween? Or are they simply trying to cope with what the world throws at them?

I am working on the 6th Monk Buttman book. I’ve seen him and his family and friends through a number of trying circumstances. As a writer, that’s by design: Something interesting has to happen to keep the reader engaged. But as any writer will tell you, after a certain point, you inhabit your characters, you live and breath them, you know their history, and you know their quirks, where they do well, and where they do not.

I purposefully put Monk, and by extension those around him, into problematic situations. For some readers in the early books (1-3), this has to do with Monk being involved with 2 women at the same time. Some don’t like that, while others don’t seem too…