The Secretarium
Author: Yara Hallowell (author page)
A blackout drill that isn’t a drill.
Price: $ 5.99
Blurb
Disgraced ritual historian Leda Morrell never planned to step foot in Hallowmere College again. But when a patron’s bequest drags her back to the stone courtyards and ivy-strangled lecture halls, the city’s papers begin to whisper: another student dead, another date circled in red.
The pattern is impossible to ignore. Each death mirrors a banned thirteen-rite calendar Hallowmere swore it burned a century ago.
With only her former rival Felix Ashdown for an uneasy ally, Leda starts reading between the lines: ink ghosts in lecture handouts, redacted minutes of faculty meetings, marginalia in books that should have been pulped. The trail threads through a copper-lined campus survey and down to the Secretarium, a sealed vault beneath the college library that houses the records no one admits exist.
As a secret society races to complete the final rite, Leda must expose a centuries-old selection ritual before she becomes its last offering.
Story
(Excerpt from “The Secretarium” by Yara Hallowell)
“That’s how they lived with it,” Leda said. “By declaring it necessary in clear prose and then calling it complicated. You can justify anything if you write it down nicely.”
He gave a short, humourless huff.
“Spoken like a former rising star of ritual theory,” he said.
“Spoken like someone who nearly wrote the paper that would have dressed this up as folklore,” she said. “Harrow stopped me. Then he got himself killed trying to stop the machine instead of theorising it.”
Felix’s gaze met hers.
“You think the Secretarium killed him,” he said.
“I think he jabbed too hard at the joints,” she said. “And someone decided the system would function better without his finger in it.”
Silence stretched between them. The rain on the windows had eased, but the light outside remained flat and colourless.
Format: Ebook
Paperback: Coming soon
Length: Full-length novel, approx. 138,900 words · 382 pages
Genre: Dark academia thriller / dystopian political suspense
Story scope: Book one in The Hallowell Lectures series
Tone: Tense, controlled, morally sharp; conspiracy without “cartoon villains”
Facts
Good to know: The central set-piece is a campus-wide blackout drill tied to a copper-lined chamber beneath the library and an elite society’s influence network.
Explore further
More titles by Yara Hallowell are available on the
books page.
Ideal for readers who like: Secret-society institutions, procedural dread, smart dialogue, and protagonists who fight systems with evidence, maps, and nerve.
Content note: Themes of coerced “selection,” institutional abuse of power, threats/arrest pressure, and injury during a high-risk drill.