If We Were Villains

February 27, 2017
The premise of Rio’s debut novel is intriguing: it’s a murder mystery set at a Illinois college specializing in Shakespeare studies, led by a man with the coincidentally appropriate name of Holinshed. The story follows a group of college students’ passions, jealousies, and insecurities, which, over time, escalate to murder. Rio makes effective use of her framing device—a prologue set in 2007 introduces one of the students, Oliver Marks, who is about to be released on parole from prison after a decade behind bars for murder. The homicide detective who handled the case, Joseph Colborne, is about to retire from the force and attempts to convince Oliver to finally come clean about what really happened by promising him that anything he reveals will be off the record. Flashbacks disclose what led up to the death of one of the students in 1997 and the tensions Oliver observed among his classmates before and after. Though the plot twists may not surprise some readers, this is a solid mystery that keeps the pages turning.

Starred review from February 15, 2017
For a clique of aspiring Shakespearean actors at an elite arts academy, the line between performance and reality dissolves, with disastrous results.In the prologue to this bloody, melodramatic, suspenseful debut novel, we meet former drama student Oliver Marks, now finishing up a 10-year prison sentence. He is visited by the cop who brought him to justice on the eve of his retirement, asking if Marks will finally tell him the truth of what happened that night at Dellecher Classical Conservatory. He agrees to do so after his upcoming release, on the condition that there are no repercussions for revealing his secrets. And so he begins. "Enter the players. There were seven of us then, seven bright young things with wide precious futures ahead of us...surrounded by words and books and poetry, all the fierce passions of the world bound in leather and vellum." They are in their fourth year, the kings and queens of the campus, dividing among them all the best roles in the productions of Macbeth and Julius Caesar planned for that fall. But as the semester progresses it becomes clear that just as Shakespeare's language has taken over their speech--they address each other constantly in quotes from the poetry and bits of repartee from the plays--his characters have taken over their souls, and the power struggles, jealousies, and murderous rages that fill the dramas have crossed into their real lives. "I have ransacked Shakespeare's entire oeuvre with giddy abandon," Rio confesses in her Author's Note, managing to cleverly weave a whole new story from the poetry and plots of Macbeth, Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear. "Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?" the retired detective asks the released convict. "I blame him for all of it," the narrator replies. This novel about obsession at the conservatory will thoroughly obsess you.

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March 15, 2017
Rio, a Shakespearean scholar, brings her expertise to this debut novel, deftly weaving passages both brief and lengthy from several plays into a tale worthy of the Bard himself. When Oliver Marks is released after spending 10 years in jail, his arresting officer is waiting for him. Detective Colborne was never convinced of his guilt. Oliver and six other young actors were studying Shakespeare at an elite arts conservatory. Each was consistently cast in roles that match their offstage identitiesthe hero, the villain, the victim, and other dramatis personae. When these roles were reversed in a new production, and the secondary characters were given lead roles, this order was disturbed, with fatal consequences. When one of the group is found dead, those remaining marshal their considerable theatrical talents to baffle the police, and Oliver ends up taking the blame. And so, their breathtaking tale, full of sound and fury, is finally told, ending in one final, astonishing twist. Recommended for readers with refined literary tastes, and those looking for something like Donna Tartt.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)