If We Were Villains

If We Were Villains understands that the most dangerous role in a tragedy is the loyal friend who never leaves the stage.

I expected M.L. Rio to make me nervous about a murder. Instead, I spent most of the book nervous about a group of young actors who had forgotten how to stop performing for one another. It is a deliciously theatrical distinction. I liked this novel more for its account of loyalty than for its puzzle, and I say that as someone who normally wants to interrogate the butler before chapter three.

My reservations are equally theatrical. Sometimes everyone is so perfectly assigned a role that I wanted to see what they were like waiting for a bus. The intensity is part of the design, but a stage light can flatten as well as illuminate. Rio's strongest passages recognise that a person can become trapped by the part their friends need them to play. The weaker ones let the part do too much of the work.

The premise (no spoilers past the opening night setup)

Oliver Marks leaves prison after ten years, and Detective Colborne, who put him there, asks for the truth. Oliver takes us back to his final year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, where he was one of seven actors devoted to Shakespeare. The group is close, competitive, and used to casting one another in familiar roles: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingénue, and the people left at the edge of the stage. Oliver is accustomed to being one of those supporting players.

As rivalries sharpen, violence crosses from performance into their lives. That is the publisher's threshold and mine. Knowing that Oliver ends up in prison gives the past its pressure, but the exact path there belongs to the novel. You can enter without remembering your school production of Julius Caesar. You may leave with a sudden desire to apologise to everyone who was in it.

What works

Rio builds a frame that makes every remembered exchange feel like evidence and an audition. Oliver tells a story to the detective after a decade of living with its consequences. He has had time to revise his understanding, and perhaps his presentation. That double purpose makes his account slippery in an interesting way. I kept asking not only what happened, but which version of himself Oliver most wanted Colborne to see. A confession can be another performance. The book knows it.

The theatrical structure is more than decoration. The movement between a present inquiry and a remembered final year gives the story an audience inside itself. Colborne listens as we do, alert for the line that has been rehearsed too often. The actors' habit of speaking through Shakespeare gives them a shared language, but shared language can also be a way to avoid plain speech. Every borrowed line asks who is hiding behind it. That is the central pleasure of Rio's craft: form, character, and suspicion keep nudging one another.

The group chemistry has a charged, almost claustrophobic rhythm. Their closeness makes ambition personal. A casting choice becomes an assessment of worth; an ordinary disagreement feels like a threat to the whole company. Rio is especially persuasive about the hunger to remain indispensable. Anyone who has belonged to an intense small circle will recognise the strange arithmetic: being loved by the group can come to feel less important than being needed by it. That is where the book got its claws into me.

I also appreciate its willingness to be earnest. So many novels about clever young people protect themselves with a wink. This one commits to the heightened feeling of actors who live among tragedies and begin treating every emotion as a speech. The commitment can be excessive, but I prefer an excess with conviction to a book that keeps glancing at the reader for permission. When the emotional pitch works, it makes the smallest silence feel like someone missed a cue on purpose.

What's polarising

The Shakespeare saturation is real. Characters think, speak, and measure one another through the plays. If you love the language, you get a second set of meanings humming beneath the dialogue. If you do not, you may feel cornered at a party by seven people who all chose the same subject for their dissertations. I sometimes wanted a sentence that belonged entirely to them. The novel's obsession with performance is convincing, but its characters can sound too ready to prove the thesis.

The role labels are another mixed gift. They make the ensemble easy to grasp and show how a group can imprison its own members in expectation. Yet they also risk keeping some people at the level of type. I know what place they occupy in the company before I know what they would do outside it. That may be the point, but an intentional limitation is still a limitation. I was most moved when Oliver's loyalty felt like an active choice; I was less moved when it seemed written into his casting notice.

The mystery, too, is subordinate to the atmosphere. If you want a fair contest of clues, look elsewhere. Rio wants the question of responsibility to keep widening until it takes in the whole group. I found that more satisfying than the mechanics, although a reader who came for a tightly engineered investigation could reasonably demand more. These people are forever talking about tragedy. The novel is interested in what happens when tragedy asks them to pay for the ticket.

The Oliver Marks of it

Oliver's apparent modesty is a surprisingly effective hiding place. As a narrator used to the margins, he can present himself as the reliable witness to louder people's passions. I was sympathetic to him, then suspicious of how convenient that position is. The person who says he only held the spotlight for someone else still chose where to aim it.

His devotion to the group is the emotional centre of the book, and his closeness with James gives that devotion a particular ache. I do not need every feeling labelled to believe it matters. Rio lets attachment blur into loyalty, envy, and longing, which feels right for people trained to perform certainty before they understand themselves. I only wish the quieter texture of their friendship had been allowed a little more ordinary air. A bond cannot live on dramatic lighting alone. Even actors need breakfast.

Spice and heat

At 1 of 5, this has romantic tension and some low-detail sexual material, but very little on-page heat. The relationships matter as questions of desire and allegiance rather than as a sequence of explicit encounters. Anyone seeking a central romance with a reassuring destination should approach it as literary suspense first. The yearning is there; the promise of comfort is not.

Content note: murder, physical violence, abusive behaviour, substance misuse, and suicidal thoughts. Those elements are serious parts of the story, not accessories to its candlelit setting. Check your own limits before settling in with this particular troupe.

Who it's for

Read it if you like a closed circle whose members know each other's cues better than their own motives. Read it if you want dark academia with greasepaint on its cuffs and a narrator whose loyalty deserves cross-examination. A working knowledge of Shakespeare adds pleasure, but curiosity is enough. You need not identify every allusion to understand the danger of believing a script has already decided who you are.

Pass if you need every member of an ensemble to have an equally full life beyond the central obsession, or if literary quotation makes your shoulders rise towards your ears. I did occasionally want to tell the entire class to go for a walk separately. Then I turned another page. That is the inconvenient part of a good review: you can see the flaw clearly and still want the next act.

Books like If We Were Villains

• The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton: theatre turns private experience into public performance in a formally daring, less murderous novel.
• These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever: an obsessive bond between two college students tightens towards violence, with intimacy rather than an ensemble at the centre.
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt: another secluded academic circle makes a terrible case for its own exceptionalism, at a slower and colder tempo.
• The It Girl by Ruth Ware: an Oxford friendship and a death return years later as a sharper, more conventional mystery.

Start with Catton if the tension between acting and living was your favourite part. Choose Ware if you want the investigation to take the lead. Rio's particular trick is making a supporting player hold the whole stage while insisting he is standing in the wings. I believed him just long enough to worry about my own judgement.

Finished the book and not ready to leave? Oliver Marks is waiting on Fictora.

Talk to Oliver Marks