M.L. Rio

American author of If We Were Villains, a debut novel that fuses Shakespeare, academia, and murder mystery to create one of the most acclaimed literary thrillers in years.

M. L. Rio is an American author and academic whose debut novel If We Were Villains became one of the most discussed literary thrillers of recent years, accumulating an enormous word-of-mouth following before its reputation solidified into genuine cult classic status. Published in 2017, the book follows a group of seven Shakespeare students at a conservatory theater school where a murder occurs, and where the line between performance and reality has been dangerously blurred by years of inhabiting characters more vivid than themselves.

The novel is deeply Shakespearean in structure and reference, with the seven students assigned archetypal roles — the hero, the villain, the ingénue — and the action of the book drawing heavily on the tragedies and histories that define the conservatory’s curriculum. Rio wears her learning lightly, but If We Were Villains rewards readers who know the plays well, as the parallels between the characters’ real lives and the Shakespeare roles they play become increasingly layered and ironic.

Rio’s prose style is literary and precise, her atmosphere thick with the particular hothouse intensity of artistic institutions where talent, ego, ambition, and passion are constantly in collision. The novel is simultaneously a locked-room mystery, a tragedy, and a love letter to the power of theater and language. For readers of The Secret History by Donna Tartt, If We Were Villains scratches the same itch: a dark academia thriller where beauty and violence are fatally intertwined.