Graveyard Shift: A Novella

Rio’s satisfying follow-up to If We Were Villains features five night-shift workers who regularly meet up for a midnight smoke break at a church cemetery. The group includes Edie, editor-in-chief of her college newspaper; Theo, the gossipy general manager of the university watering hole; Tamar, who holds down a nearby hotel reception desk; Tuck, the church’s caretaker; and Hannah, a mechanic who pulls late-night rideshare shifts. The crew’s routine is disrupted one night when they discover a freshly dug hole in the graveyard, where Tuck insists no one new has been buried in over a century. A few minutes later, Edie and Tuck notice a stranger dumping a pile of rat corpses into the hole. On closer inspection, the rats appear to be growing strange spores on their snouts. Edie and Tuck inform the rest of the group, who speculate that the rats may be connected to covert scientific research being done at the university, which Edie sets out to investigate. Rio stuffs a plethora of surprises into her concise narrative without skimping on character development. This packs a punch. Agent: Arielle Datz, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary. (Sept.)

Correction: A previous version of this review misstated the amount of time that elapses between the discoveries of the freshly dug hole and what’s being dumped there.