I admire it, but I can't love it

After finishing my rewrite of Starfire, I'm taking some time away from the novel to clear my head of everything I know about it, before doing the final read-through.  And in the meantime I've been reading  some of the stack of books on my To Be Read pile.

So far, I've read an adult urban fantasy/magical realism book by a well-regarded female SF author, and a young adult SF book by a male author.  And though they're vastly different worlds, they have a lot in common.

Firstly, they're both dystopian worlds.  One is about the breakdown of science, law and order in the contemporary time of Earth.  The other is a portrait of the corruption of the high ideals of a new colony by one evil human.  Both of these books present richly detailed worlds. And both books are well written.  The writing sparkles, the pace is good, the stories hauled me in and carried me along with them.  And yet...

The test for whether I love a book is whether I want to re-read it when I get to the end.  And both these books failed that test.  Why?  Because both the protagonists get sucked in by the darkness, they don't fight it.

Yes, I am naive, but the fiction i love has an idealistic streak to it, a hero or heroine surrounded on all sides by darkness, but refusing to give in to it.  But that's not what I found in these books.

In the adult book, the main character finds out what's happened to a pair of missing twins she's been hired to find.  And she stands by, completely passive, watching the people who hired her kill them.  In much gory detail.  And she never makes a move.  She changes nothing, justice isn't done, and the book ends with her running for the border.  Not the kind of character I can relate to.

The young adult book has the main character realising he's been brutalised all his life, that it's been leading up to training him to kill.  He knows it's wrong, but what does he do?  He kills a defenceless alien.

Sorry, but these aren't characters I can fall in love with, or authors whose mindsets I can admire.  I might admire their slick writing, but I won't be seeking out any more of it.