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I enjoyed If We Were Villains when I read it in 2017, but I’m puzzled by the reputation it’s acquired in the years since. It seems to be treated as one of the totemic campus novels, often spoken about as though it is equivalent to The Secret History rather than a pastiche of it (I always assumed it was a deliberate one � an homage in which Shakespeare takes the place of Classics). Rio’s second novel, then, arrives with a lot of expectation heaped on it. Can the author create a similarly compelling story outside an established and well-loved formula?

On the evidence of Graveyard Shift, I’m not convinced. It starts well enough, with five friends meeting at midnight in a churchyard that sits on a university campus, only to discover a mysterious open grave. Definitely academic, certainly dark. Too bad, the rest of it’s a damp squib. Despite being short, it’s devoid of tension or urgency, and the prose is riddled with cliches (‘like a dog with a bone, she refused to let the matter drop� is a typical sentence). The characters are a grab-bag of features with no real personality, and the ending is silly. This might have made a decent episode of a podcast or something but it doesn’t work as a book.

I received an advance review copy of Graveyard Shift from the publisher through .