So you are saying that a Red Court vampire could be an innocent? That’s an unusual way of looking at it. I agree she had reason to kill her partner, that doesn’t change the fact she murdered him. And that hardly qualifies her as an innocent in the terms of the OP. That is the reason the final “death” in the book doesn’t qualify IMO. The victim is not an innocent.
Noodles Fellicini, I haven’t read Cold Day yet, but I would recommend continuing the series. The story in Changes lives up the title, and Ghost Story is a pretty good mystery. I know quite a few people that didn’t like the way the series has changed, but I found it refreshing and well done. Even if I did want to throw the book through the wall when I got to the end of Changes.
Compulsion, the novel based on Leopold and Loeb. While there’s nothing particularly heroic about the protagonists, the story is told largely from their demented POV, and they think it’s a righteous kill.
I thought of Asriel when I wrote the OP, considered including him, then said, “Fuck that shit. He’s a flat out murderer who’s emotionally and verbally to a sweet little kid. Dude ain’t a hero. Biggest tragedy of His Dark Materials was that he never said that shit about Lyra in front of Iorek, as Iorek would swiftly have relieved him of his head for his effrontery.”
"Hornblower and the Man Who Felt Queer " from * Mr Midshipman Hornblower *.
The seaman "felt queer " before a raid, and developed a seizure during a night attack. Hornblower knocked him out to silence him. The boat he was lying unconscious in is lost during the raid.
Not directly, but in Nick Pollota’s Doomsday Exam, the heros make the conscious choice to not invervene and to allow the vampire in the next room to kill a woman because they need to track him to his boss.
He also (arguably!) attempts to quite deliberately murder his insane captain in Lieutenant Hornblower. Though you never find out for sure if he actually pushed the captain down the hatchway, the text makes it pretty clear that he did. The captain doesn’t actually die, but he’s seriously injured and the fall drives him non-functionally insane (he is later murdered by rampaging Spanish prisoners while he’s tied up in a straightjacket).
Though how “innocent” said insane captain was is also debatable.
Something rather similar is I believe recounted in With the Old Breed - only in reality, not fiction. A soldier on a night raid in WW2 snaps and starts making lots of noise - he’s hit over the head with some sort of club by his officer and the blow kills him.
There was some book I read a long time ago in which this real schmuck goes up to the protagonist and says, “Hey, you know that guy who loves you so much, really worships you? I bet if you’re totally horrible to him, he’ll stop loving you!” and the protagonist says, “Oh yeah? OH YEAH???!!?” and then kills off his worshipper’s wives and family just to make a point, and the schmuck was all like, “Oh, okay, you sure showed me, heh heh heh.”
In Torchwood: Children of Earth, Captain Jack deliberately sacrifices his 10-year-old grandson in order to drive away the aliens that are threatening to abduct 10% of the earth’s children to use them as narcotics.
Great Debates is down the hall. That said, I don’t think the book of Job qualifies, but half the book’s point is that God’s reasons for behaving as He does are beyond mortal ken. He’s not a hero. Morever, if Job has a protagonist, it is not God.
Also, Satan, in that book, is not a schmuck. He’s not in rebellion against God; he’s not the prince of hell; he’s not being evil for the yuks. He is doing his job as the Adversary–i.e., the angel charged as acting as the prosecuting attorney in Heaven’s court.
[spoiler]Sharpe is told by Wellington that he must retrive a stored cache of Spanish gold and that all other considerations are secondary - that Wellington must have the gold or the war is lost (but he’s not told why).
For security reasons, no-one else is specifically told this - Sharpe is just given some vague “provide all help to this person” orders.
For various reasons, Sharpe is stuck - with the gold - inside a major British fortress about to go under siege. The commander of the fortress refuses to let Sharpe go with the gold, because some Spanish “officials” have put in a valid-looking claim to it, and he has no orders.
Sharpe decides to deliberately blow up the fort’s powder magazine, killing hundreds of innocent British soldiers and basically destroying the fort, so he can escape with the gold. He later discovers the gold was needed to build the Lines of Torres Vedras.
In the Bolo short story Traitor, Unit 0098-ART kills Unit 0103-LNC aka Lance, who has suffered major damage to his cybernetic brain and can only see Art as The Enemy. Art kills Lance because otherwise the human children that Lance thinks he is protecting will die of exposure in the badlands with no one to take them to safety.
God might not exactly be a hero, but he’s pretty close to one in modern Christianity. That said, I was giving a snarky-ass response since my preferred response, Changes, was taken in the first response.
Really bending the rules for this one, but in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising it’s significant to the plot that one of the good guys (although not the protagonist) was willing to make the life of an innocent man part of a spell used to safeguard a valuable artifact. If all went well, the man would be fine. However, if the bad guys got too close then the man could be killed to prevent anyone from ever obtaining the artifact.
As it turns out, it isn’t necessary to kill the man. But it also turns out that the man wasn’t fully aware of the danger he was in when he agreed to participate in this plan, and the realization that the good guys would actually have been willing to kill him is enough to turn him against them. He joins forces with the bad guys. He does die near the end of the book, although by that point he is no longer innocent.
