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Books like If We Were Villains
24 connected reads, with a reason for every recommendation.
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8 reading possibilities- 01
A tightly knit group of college students and the crime binding them together make this a defining dark-academia companion.
- 02
A lonely student enters an unsettling creative-writing clique in this strange, sharply satirical campus novel.
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A therapist investigates a series of murders among a secretive group at Cambridge in this campus-set thriller.
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An unexpected connectionA secret society recruits gifted scholars into a contest where knowledge and ambition carry extraordinary stakes.
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Art history, tarot, ambition, and a suspicious death shape this atmospheric academic mystery.
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This dark, character-driven novel traces the dangerous intensity of a relationship between two college students.
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A college reunion reopens an old murder case and the complicated loyalties of a close-knit group of friends.
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An unexpected connectionA student drawn into Yale’s occult societies investigates a mystery in a campus world of hidden power.
Explore 16 more recommendations
- 09
A student is drawn into the orbit of an enigmatic musical prodigy in this unsettling university novel.
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A student’s fascination with a charismatic professor and her circle turns an academic setting into a web of suspicion.
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A bookish student at an elite school tries to make sense of a teacher’s death and the secrets around it.
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An unexpected connectionAt a perilous school for young magic-users, a fiercely independent student must navigate dangerous classmates and rules.
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A teacher returns to her former boarding school, where old tragedies begin to echo in the present.
- 14
A college student’s involvement with a radical group shapes this compact, morally charged campus novel.
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Years after a friend’s murder at Oxford, a woman revisits the case as new questions emerge.
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An unexpected connectionAn adult narrator looks back on the teenage fascination that drew her into a charismatic group on the edge of violence.
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This witty university novel follows an English professor through departmental rivalries and the demands of Shakespeare scholarship.
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A new teacher and her students challenge a school’s entrenched culture in this suspenseful story of secrets and resistance.
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At Oxford, a student’s fascination with a wealthy and magnetic classmate leads into a story of influence and disillusionment.
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An unexpected connectionA student’s complicated friendship at a New England boarding school offers a quieter but resonant study of loyalty and rivalry.
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This bleakly comic campus novel follows interconnected students through desire, alienation, and destructive choices.
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At an elite prep school, a student investigates a death amid the cutthroat ambitions of a clique named for Ivy League colleges.
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A school’s discriminatory culture and a student’s hidden power converge in this contemporary horror thriller.
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An unexpected connectionA graduate student discovers a hidden world of stories and secret keepers in this richly imaginative literary mystery.
About the book
M. L. Rio’s 2017 novel follows college students who are actors, bringing fiction, thriller, mystery, dark academia, and LGBT themes together in a contemporary setting.
About the author
M. L. Rio is an American novelist and theater professional; If We Were Villains is her debut novel.