When the Stage Becomes a Crime Scene
I picked up If We Were Villains on a gray Sunday when the rain wouldn’t stop. I was in my kitchen, tea going cold, and something about the cover — a stag, dark woods, that red title — made me think I was in for a cozy mystery. I was wrong. Dead wrong.
The book opens with Oliver Marks getting out of prison after ten years. He’s met by the detective who put him there. The detective wants the truth. Oliver wants to tell it. That frame sets up everything: a story about a story, a confession wrapped in theater. The question that planted itself in my head was this: Can a person who spends four years learning to pretend ever really tell the truth about themselves?
How the Actors Become Their Roles
The core of the novel is seven students at a prestigious arts conservatory. They live, breathe, and breathe again Shakespeare. They fight in iambic pentameter. They kiss like Romeo and Juliet. They betray like Iago. The main character, Oliver, is the quiet one. He watches. He narrates. But he’s not passive — he’s a witness who becomes a suspect.
The plot: a murder happens. One of the seven dies. And the remaining six are trapped in a web of guilt, performance, and memory. I won’t tell you who dies or who did it. That would be cruel. What I will say is that the tension comes from something deeper than whodunit. It comes from watching people who have been trained to lie beautifully slowly stop knowing where the lie ends and they begin.
There was a moment about halfway through where I had to put the book down. A character delivers a monologue from Macbeth, and the line between the play and their real life just dissolved. I felt cold. That’s the book’s trick — it makes you feel like you’re watching a play, until suddenly you realize you’re in the courtroom.
The Imagery of Blood and Light
Rio’s craft is subtle. She doesn’t hit you over the head with metaphors. Instead, she uses light. The conservatory is bathed in theatrical lighting, always. Stage lights. Candlelight. The dim glow of a backstage bulb. And then, when the murder happens, the light changes. It becomes sickly. Fluorescent. Unforgiving.
There’s a key image that stayed with me. After the death, the characters perform a scene from King Lear. They’re on stage, but the lights are wrong. The audience doesn’t know what happened. The actors do. And in that gap — between what the audience sees and what the actors know — Rio plants her entire argument. We are always performing. The question is whether we know our own script.
The book has problems, honestly. The pacing in the middle drags. Some of the Shakespeare references feel like homework. If you don’t know your Hamlet from your Henry V, you might feel lost. Also, the female characters are a bit thin. They’re given big speeches, but their inner lives feel sketched rather than painted.
What the Book Does to You
This book won’t give you easy answers. It won’t tell you who is guilty and who is innocent in a neat bow. Instead, it asks a harder question: If we are all playing roles — student, friend, lover, villain — then who is responsible when the script goes wrong? Can you blame the actor for following the lines?
I’ve thought about this book for weeks after finishing it. It reminded me of a time in college when I said something cruel to a friend during a fight. Later, I told myself I was just angry. But I wasn’t just angry. I was playing a role — the righteous one, the hurt one. And I didn’t even know I was acting.
Who should read this? People who love theater. People who have ever felt like they’re pretending to be someone they’re not. People who enjoy slow-burn literary thrillers with more atmosphere than action. Who shouldn’t? If you want a fast-paced mystery with clear heroes and villains, skip it. If you hate Shakespeare, definitely skip it. You’ll be miserable.
What I gained was a simple, uncomfortable truth: we are all capable of becoming the villain in someone else’s story. And sometimes we don’t even realize we’ve auditioned for the part.
The strongest cage in this book was never the prison. It was the stage. And Oliver, for all his years of pretending, finally found one moment of real emotion. It came at the very end. He was no longer playing a role. He was just a man, standing in the rain, telling the truth about what he’d done. That moment — brief, imperfect, real — made the whole journey worth it.
