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Cover of If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio

If We Were Villains

M. L. Rio

  • 368 pages · about 6 hours
  • First published 2017
  • 17 editions
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1 About this book

Entreated to tell his side of the story to a detective who put him in prison a decade earlier for a murder he may not have committed, Oliver Marks describes his past as a Shakespearean actor in college whose rivalry with a castmate escalated in dangerous ways.

  • Thrillers
  • Mystery
  • Mystery Thriller
  • Coming of age
  • College students
  • Actors
  • Dark Academia
  • Queer

2 What to expect

A campus mystery set at an elite Shakespeare conservatory: ten years after a death sent him to prison, a former acting student finally tells a detective what happened in his final year. A tight group of friends, always cast in the same kinds of role, let their stage rivalries spill into life, and they speak in Shakespeare quotations throughout. It is melodramatic, atmospheric and suspenseful, and laid out in acts and scenes like a play.

Good for readers who want: dark academia, a theatre-school mystery, and Shakespeare woven through a thriller.

3 About M. L. Rio

 

M. L. Rio is an author, but before she was an author she was an actor, and before she was an actor she was just a word nerd whose best friends were books. She holds an MA in Shakespeare Studies from King's College London and Shakespeare's Globe and a PhD in early modern English literature from the University of Maryland, College Park.

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