The Hawthorne Fellowship Fraud
A Dark Academia Novel

About this book:

At St. Jude's University, the Hawthorne Crypt holds centuries of forbidden knowledge—alchemy manuscripts, political ciphers, and the uncatalogued marginalia of a seventeenth-century occultist. Access is granted only to the winner of the legendary Hawthorne Fellowship. For arch-rivals Maeve Hyde and Julian Vance, it's the career-defining prize they've spent years sabotaging each other to win. Then the board announces a centuries-old codicil: the fellowship will only be awarded to a married or engaged scholarly pair.

With three weeks until the deadline and zero prospects, Maeve and Julian strike a devil's bargain: a fake engagement, a shared apartment, and a joint research proposal combining her paleographic precision with his cryptographic brilliance. It's a transaction. A performance. A mutually assured destruction pact if either breaks character. But as they stage domestic bliss for the committee and descend into the Crypt's restricted wing, the line between rehearsal and reality blurs. The texts they uncover whisper of a darker purpose behind Hawthorne's marital mandate—and the longer they play the part, the harder it becomes to remember where the act ends and the truth begins.

*The Hawthorne Fellowship Fraud* is a dark academia enemies-to-lovers thriller where ambition wears a wedding ring, forbidden archives hide deadly secrets, and two brilliant scholars must decide whether the truth they're hunting is worth the lie they're living.