The Deception Seminar
A Psychological Thriller

About this book:

At Hawthorne University, the semester's most dangerous course isn't on the syllabus—it's the marriage teaching it. Charles Cross and Julia Miller are the department's golden couple: brilliant, tenured, and locked in a decade-long war of attrition for the Pendergast Chair. Their new capstone seminar, *The Architecture of Deception*, is meant to be their final public duel before the board decides a winner. But when a federal audit exposes forty-two thousand dollars in ghost participants and a fabricated memory study bearing both their signatures, the classroom becomes a crime scene—and the only evidence is the life they've built together.

Julia insists the irregularities are administrative artifacts; Charles knows the data is a hollow shell she constructed while he was away. Each knows the other's tells, each has spent fourteen years mapping the other's blind spots, and both understand the first rule of high-stakes concealment: the most convincing lie is the one you tell yourself. As the semester unfolds—through polygraph dinners, forged evidence, and a midterm that feels like an interrogation—their intellectual foreplay curdles into something far more dangerous. The students are watching. The auditors are closing in. And the only way out is through the other.

Smart, surgical, and suffused with the erotic tension of two predators who know exactly how to skin each other, *The Deception Seminar* is a psychological thriller where every chapter is a lesson in leakage, every marriage is a long con, and the final grade determines who survives.