In short, I was never going to surface from this story with my emotions intact. Rio has set the scene for an exhilarating, unsettling, and devastating thriller. Shakespearian aesthetics, academic setting, homoeroticism, a secret society whose members communicate (pretentiously) through literary quotes, characters doing morally dubious things at odd hours, a devastating murder, and M.L. If We Were Villains lured me in, like a fish to a hook, by appealing to my dark academia loving heart.

The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man, that I can’t suppress a smile. “Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?” And the truth surges back with a vengeance. But for one last time, his brain is revisiting those old haunts, dredging up those years again, churning them to the surface to be rewound and replayed, remembering. Now, no longer prison-bound, with the realization that there is no darkness Detective Colborne can send him to rival what he endured already, Oliver is ready to put the last spectre of the past where it belongs. Oliver Marks keeps many secrets with sharp edges. Only one person can say which one was true.

There are so many versions of the story, so many neat distillations of what had happened. Now, ten years later, detective Colborne feels every choice he’d made, every action he took that fatal night, as a weight he carries with him. At some point, our merry band of thespians become less friends and more things for each other to hit. The friendship, once beautiful, begins to hold something worth fearing. But as these things so often go, something dark and sinister soon sews hatred in them, and wedges its way between them. If We Were Villains is the story of a tightly knit group of seven lyric-mad Shakespearean thespians who seem to prefer each other’s company to anyone else’s, thereby offending the rest of the world.

If you still want to know more about this book, I assume you're a masochist. You are literally a bound bundle of dead tree. That ending grabbed an invisible dagger and twisted it between my ribs. I tore through it, but I feel like it tore through me. I hate this book so much I can't bear it. Reader, when you read the synopsis for this book, you will likely hear a voice saying, “Oh, this sounds interesting! Let's do it.” And I’m here to tell you right now-that’s the devil talking.ĭon't let my five-star rating fool you.

If we were villains book cover