If We Were Villains

If We Were Villains is a mystery novel by the American writer M. L. Rio, published in 2017 and her first book.

Dellecher is a fictional Shakespeare conservatory, and the seven fourth-year students live together in a building they call the Castle, are cast according to type in every production and quote each other's lines under pressure. Rio uses that arrangement the way other crime novelists use a family: the group has its own laws about loyalty, its own hierarchies and its own ways of not saying things, and the murder that ends the year is worked out in retrospect by a narrator who has had ten years to think about what he should have done. The book moves between the present-day interview and the year itself, so the reader knows the outcome and not the reasoning, and it keeps the theatre's language in the foreground without treating it as decoration. The plot turns on typecasting, which is the novel's best idea: the roles the students are given in their last year turn out to describe what they are capable of. A television adaptation is in development.