If We Were Villains

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Auditions and the Castle way of living
2. Halloween Macbeth and the night by the lake
3. Police, Thanksgiving, and Romeo and Juliet
4. Spring Lear and the walls closing in
5. Ten years later and the Pericles clue
6. What worked for me and what wore thin
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up If We Were Villains because a friend who works backstage kept telling me it was the theater kid crime novel. I had just finished rereading Hamlet for fun, which tells you what kind of reader I am, and I wanted something with greasepaint and bad decisions. The copy I read was the Flatiron Books hardcover, first published in 2017, 368 pages. It starts with a man in prison about to get out, which hooked me fast.

Oliver Marks has served ten years when the book opens. Detective Joseph Colborne, the man who arrested him, comes to see him before release. Colborne is retiring from the force and says he wants the real story, off the record, no consequences. Oliver agrees to talk after he walks out. Then Oliver rewinds to 1997, his fourth and final year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, a small and cutthroat Shakespeare school built around a dorm called the Castle. From there the book stays mostly in the past, with Oliver narrating, until the last stretch catches up to the present again.

The setup is simple on purpose. Seven fourth year actors share the Castle because everyone else has been cut in earlier years. They play the same parts onstage and off, which the book leans on hard.

Oliver is our narrator. He thinks of himself as the least talented of the group, a middle kid from a plain family whose father disapproves of acting. He often gets cast as the sidekick or the chorus figure, the one who watches.

Richard Stirling comes next in my head because he takes up so much air. He is talented in a big, physical way, second generation theater, used to getting leads and used to getting his way. Early on he reads as charismatic. Later he reads as dangerous.

James Farrow is Oliver's best friend. He is thoughtful and steady onstage, the natural hero type. Oliver admires him in a way that slowly turns into something more, which matters a lot by the end.

Meredith Dardenne dates Richard for much of the fall. She comes from a wealthy family, striking onstage, often cast as the sharp tongued lover. People underestimate her because of how she looks. She is smarter about the group than they think.

Wren Stirling is Richard's cousin. She is quieter, often cast as the ingenue, prone to nerves and to going pale backstage. The others get protective of her. That protectiveness becomes part of what breaks them.

Filippa Kosta rounds out the live in group with calm competence. She is often stuck in small parts despite being reliable. After prison she is the only one who stays in steady touch with Oliver, which tells you a lot about her.

Alexander Vass is the seventh, funny and openly gay, a former foster kid who uses drugs more than he should and jokes when he should not. He is usually cast as the villain. He calls out the typecasting before anyone else does.

Their teachers are Frederick Teasdale, kindly and older, who favors James, and Gwendolyn Oswald, stricter, who favors Richard. Their fall show is Julius Caesar. That play matters because the casting lands exactly where Alexander predicted, hero here, tyrant there, lovers and plotters and background Romans, and it sets the pecking order for everything that follows.

Auditions and the Castle way of living

What I liked about the first hundred pages is how lived in Dellecher feels. The Castle is cramped and cold in the way old dorms are. They cook together. They run lines in the kitchen. They drink too much cheap wine. They quote Shakespeare at each other to be funny and to be cruel. Rio knows that world from the inside. She lets them speak in half lines from plays the way theater students actually do, as shorthand.

The culling system gives the fall a nervous edge. If you slip, you are out. Only seven fourth years remain from a larger starting class. That makes them close. It also makes them mean. They need each other to rehearse and they compete for the same two or three good roles.

Teasdale and Oswald run the acting program with different styles. Teasdale is warm. Oswald is exacting. The students track who likes whom. James gets praise for control. Richard gets praise for force. Oliver gets notes about being solid and forgettable, which stings him more than he admits. Meredith gets notes about beauty, which irritates her. Wren gets protected. Filippa gets overlooked. Alexander gets warned about focus. None of this is subtle. It is not meant to be. At nineteen, a casting list can feel like a verdict on your soul.

The Julius Caesar rehearsals bring Richard's edge out. Onstage he plays the tyrant figure with real menace. Offstage he drinks and postures. The fight work gives the men an excuse to hit each other harder than needed. Oliver, Alexander and James start pushing back during the assassination scene, which is supposed to be stage violence and starts feeling less staged. You can tell Rio has been in rooms where fake knives feel a little too real.

Halloween Macbeth and the night by the lake

The Halloween show is a Dellecher tradition. Fourth years perform selected scenes from Macbeth by the lake, in costume, for a small crowd. Casting comes in sealed envelopes with orders not to tell each other. Oliver gets Banquo. He expects Richard as Macbeth. On the night, James walks out as Macbeth instead. That switch lands hard. Richard smiles through it. He does not feel it.

After the show they party by the water. Richard drinks. He has been jealous of James for weeks, about acting and about attention, and that night it boils over. He goes after James near the lake and nearly drowns him. People pull them apart. Richard gives a reluctant apology. The group tries to laugh it off because the alternative is admitting one of them tried to kill another in front of guests.

I thought Rio handled this well. She does not make Richard a cartoon. He can be generous. He also has a short fuse and a habit of grabbing Meredith by the arm when he is angry. Meredith covers for him at first. Wren makes excuses because he is family. James downplays it. Oliver downplays it because he does not know what else to do. That collective shrug felt true to me.

The weeks after are ugly in a slow way. Richard gets rougher in Caesar. He shoves onstage. He baits James in the wings. He picks at Meredith until she snaps. At the Caesar cast party he punches a guy for flirting with Meredith, then turns on Meredith herself with a vile insult and a physical fight. Oliver follows Meredith after to check on her. They end up sleeping together. It is tender and messy and Oliver feels guilty about James and about Richard and about himself, all at once.

The next morning Filippa wakes them. She leads the group down to the lake. Richard is there on the shore with his skull broken in, breathing but barely. James tries to go to him. Alexander stops him and says, in effect, let him go. Let this end here. They stand around while Richard dies. Then they agree to call the police later and say they found him like that.

That passage is the moral center of the book, and it is disturbing because it is so quiet. No screaming. No big speech. Just seven tired and drunk kids deciding by looks and nods to wait. I believed it, which bothered me after I closed the book.

Police, Thanksgiving, and Romeo and Juliet

The police come, led by Colborne. He is younger here, sharp, unsatisfied. The death is ruled a drunken accident. The students give simple statements and stick to them. They are actors, after all. Lying in a straight line is a skill they have practiced.

Oliver goes home for Thanksgiving and it is bleak. His parents are distant. They tell him they will not pay for his last semester. Dellecher lets him stay on as a part time custodian, mopping and emptying bins, which humiliates him and also gives him keys and late hours. I liked this stretch because it punctures the romantic conservatory bubble. Someone has to clean the studios. For Oliver, it is him.

Back at school, the Christmas tradition is scenes from Romeo and Juliet at a masquerade ball. Rehearsals are shaky. During the show Oliver notices James watching Wren with a care that is more than friendly. Oliver feels a flash of jealousy that confuses him. He has been sleeping with Meredith. He also wants James close in a way he has not named. Rio writes this without labels, which suited the period and the characters.

Over winter break Oliver visits Meredith. They grow closer. She is vivid and direct where James is reserved. Sleeping together becomes dating, or something like it. When Oliver returns to the Castle for cleaning shifts, he overhears Colborne visiting with his partner. Colborne admits he does not buy the accident ruling. That scene chilled me. The adults are not as fooled as the kids hope.

Oliver also finds a scrap of bloodstained fabric in a fireplace and hides it in the Fine Arts Building among old sets. He does not tell the others right away. He is already keeping his own side secrets inside the group secret. That layering is very much the book. Everyone lies to the police. Most of them lie to each other. Oliver lies to himself about why.

Spring Lear and the walls closing in

Spring brings King Lear as the mainstage show. Rehearsals go badly as grief and guilt leak in. Wren faints more. James snaps during combat practice and breaks Oliver's nose. Alexander overdoses and survives. The Castle, once cozy, feels damp and airless.

The Lear cast party is where James comes apart. He gets drunk and stays in character as Edmund through the night. The next morning Oliver is cleaning their room for his custodian shift and finds a boat hook hidden in James's mattress, with old blood on it.

Oliver confronts James at intermission during Lear. The theater is full. Colborne is in the building. James tells him what happened by the lake after the Caesar party. Richard stormed out drunk. He cornered Wren when she tried to calm him and hurt her. Wren begged James to go after Richard. James followed him to the water. Richard had been waiting, taunting him, saying cruel things about James and Oliver, threatening to put James in the lake the way he had tried on Halloween. James grabbed what was near, the boat hook, and hit him. Filippa knew. She burned his bloody shirt in the Castle fireplace. That was the scrap Oliver found, or part of it.

They go back onstage because the show must, in the most literal way, go on. Colborne waits in the wings. James and Oliver share a kiss in front of the audience. Before Colborne can take James, Oliver steps forward and confesses. He uses James's story with small changes. His fingerprints are on the shirt scrap and on the hook from moving them, so the physical evidence fits him well enough. He is arrested.

Ten years later and the Pericles clue

The last section jumps to 2008 and Oliver's release. Filippa meets him. She works for Dellecher now. She tells him James stopped visiting years ago. What he gets instead is news that James drowned himself four years earlier. No body was found, which will matter.

Oliver visits Meredith in Chicago. She acts on television now. She admits she was the one who told Colborne to be at Lear that night and to take James in. James had confessed to her after a hard rehearsal. Oliver tells her he loved James back then, and that he loved her too, in a different way. They agree, tentatively, to try again. I liked that Rio did not make it a grand reunion. It is awkward. People have jobs and old hurts.

Filippa forwards James's suicide note. It is addressed to Oliver. Oliver recognizes the language as a speech from Pericles, Prince of Tyre, about a wife lost in a storm at sea and cast overboard, who washes up alive and lives hidden while her husband thinks her dead. James chose that speech on purpose. Oliver looks up the drowning report online. The body was never recovered.

The book ends without settling it. Did James die in the water, or did he stage a Pericles style disappearance and live hidden? Oliver leans toward hope. Colborne lets Oliver keep his story. I am not sure what I believe, and I think that uncertainty is intended. After so much lying, Rio gives Oliver a story where faith feels better than fact.

What worked for me and what wore thin

The Shakespeare frame is the reason to read this. Rio uses Julius Caesar for ambition and envy, Macbeth for guilt, Romeo and Juliet for young love at a dance, King Lear for storm, Pericles for loss and possible return. If you know those plays even roughly, the echoes add pleasure. If you do not, the plot still tracks. I had to brush up on Pericles after. That extra homework did not bother me.

The friend group felt real to me in flashes. Oliver as the watchful narrator who edits himself. James as the decent center who cracks. Richard as charm curdling into control. The Castle routines, the notes sessions, the stupid games, all of that rang true from my own college years around arts majors, though mine were musicians, not actors.

What wore thin for me was the middle third. After Richard dies, there is a long run of rehearsals and fainting and drug scares and cleaning shifts. The dread holds, but the beats repeat. I get that Rio wants exhaustion to show. Still, about fifty pages could have been tighter without losing mood.

I also wanted more interior life for Meredith, Wren and Filippa. The book admits this in a way, since Oliver narrates and Oliver watches James most. Meredith gets desire and anger but few scenes alone. Wren gets fear and little else until late. Filippa gets loyalty, then a late reveal about the shirt that deserved more buildup.

The mystery structure will divide people. The killer is withheld by having Oliver withhold. Colborne suspects but cannot prove. If you like fair play clues, you may feel cheated. I did not mind, because the book is more about complicity than detection. They all watched Richard die. Only one swung the hook.

Comparisons to Donna Tartt's campus novel are fair and also a little lazy. Yes, closed school, charismatic group, murder, classics. But Tartt is colder. Rio is warmer and stagier, more interested in love triangles and curtain calls. Rio quotes and paraphrases Shakespeare constantly, which some readers will adore and some will skim.

Who should pick it up. Readers who liked theater school stories, dark academia shelves, or slow burn thrillers with romance. Readers who know basic Shakespeare and enjoy spotting the play under the scene. Readers who do not mind spoilers as structure, since the book tells you early that Oliver served time. Who should skip it for now. Readers who want fast twists every chapter. Readers who want a detective to solve cleanly. Readers who find student drinking and drug use and abusive relationships hard to sit with, because all three are on the page, the last most seriously through Richard and Meredith and Wren.

I finished it in four nights, slower than my usual thriller pace. The last image that stayed with me was not the lake or the trial. It was Oliver cleaning studios with keys on his belt while his friends rehearsed upstairs. He loves them. He resents them. He wants out and wants in. That split felt more honest than any speech about guilt. If you read it, tell me what you make of the Pericles note. I go back and forth on whether James lived. Most days I think Oliver needs him to have lived, which is not the same as him living.

FAQ

When was If We Were Villains first published, and by whom?

It was first published in 2017 by Flatiron Books, with the hardcover running 368 pages.

Is If We Were Villains part of a series?

No. It is a standalone novel about Oliver Marks and his six Dellecher classmates, ending with an ambiguous Pericles clue.

Do I need to know Shakespeare to enjoy it?

No, the plot tracks without it, but knowing Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear and Pericles adds meaning to the casting and clues.