#Spooktober ‘Graveyard Shift ‘ by M.L Rio

About the book…

Author of sales sensation If We Were Villains returns with a story about a ragtag group of night shift workers who meet in the local cemetery to unearth the secrets lurking in an open grave.

Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story.

One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom?

Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks—and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought.

Atmospheric and eerie, with the ensemble cast her fans love and a delightfully familiar academic backdrop, ‘Graveyard Shift’ is a modern Gothic tale in ‘If We Were Villains’author M. L. Rio’s inimitable style.

Published in September by Wildfire Books, and fittingly, set in October, ‘Graveyard Shift’ brings together 5 people who are awake at the witching hour, when all others are asleep.

Various reasons keep them awake-worry about undiagnosed health issues, insomnia, working in a bar, late nights spent at a library and being an unofficial guardian of the church that the graveyard stands next to-and this novella covers one night, in a port manteaux fashion, until 10 a.m , the following morning.

Edie and Turk are who we are introduced to first, respectively a journalist and an indigent young man, members of what we come to know as the Anchorites, hanging around a graveyard as the one unmonitored place where they can smoke.

An unlikely group, each member has skills and a narrative that helps the reader place together the pieces of just what is going on in this small town, as they strive to solve the mystery of why and for what purpose, a grave was dug in a long abandoned graveyard.

Theo, the bartender, links it to the Hostile Incidents happening in this university and health research based focussed town, Tamar, a librarian who feels she is going nowhere as she dives deeper into rabbit holes to avoid facing her identity, uses her research skills to examine why. And Hannah, the insomniac, is the cold, logical heart of the group, the driver whose actions pull the disparate threads together.

The setting is suitably gothic and melancholic-a graveyard with an abandoned church, literally warning of dnagerl on a night in October, the gateway to the spookiest time of year.

Add in a gravekeeper, and the dumping of not quite what you would expect to be buried in the graveyard,and you get a body horror, an academic mystery plus a deeply detailed character study which belies the length of this novella.

It is so readable, I finished it within about 1.5 hours and turned back to the beginning to start again.

Also included are a playlist, cocktail recipes for The Corpse Reviver and The Honeydew or Die, and an end essay from M.L Rio which details her own writing process as well as background details for Graveyard Shift.

Highly recommended for a quick, sharp autumnal read.

About the author…

M. L. Rio is an author, but before she was an author she was an actor, and before she was an actor she was just a word nerd whose best friends were books.

She holds a master’s degree in Shakespeare Studies from King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe and a PhD in English from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Links-https://mlrio.com/

Twitter @sureasmel @WildfireBooks