gervase_fen | Disordered Daggers : If We Were Villains by M L Rio (2017)

Welcome to Dellecher Classical Conservatory, a liberal arts college where the theatre students spend four years immersed solely in the work of Shakespeare, or as narrator Oliver puts it - “Submerged. Here we could indulge our collective obsession. We spoke it as a second language, conversed in poetry, and lost touch with reality, a little.” Seven final year students will become six, and one will go to prison for twenty years for murder.

M L Rio’s theatrical, academic setting is as persuasive and as intoxicating as J K Rowling’s Hogwarts, as the reader, along with the students, attends performances, learns lines, blocks fights, and falls under the spell of the college traditions of Hallowe’en parties and Christmas masques. The detail M L Rio goes into depicting the process of putting on the student productions - design concepts, casting, costuming, stagecraft – impressed me immensely. The whodunnit aspect kept the pages turning, and the resolution was just to my tastes – melancholy and ambivalent. I hope this one makes it onto the Dagger shortlists in May.