“A twisted, propulsive, and utterly captivating dark academia with magic and madness at its core, AN ARCANE INHERITANCE draws readers into its spell before asking readers to consider who pays the true price of power—and what it means to refuse to let the powerful win.”
– Laura R. Samotin, author of The Sins on Their Bones

“A tautly paced, keenly observed thriller, set against an atmospherically rendered backdrop where questions of privilege and wealth haunt the narrative just as much as the literal ghosts. This is everything I adore in a dark academia book.”
– Ava Reid, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Study in Drowning

“As twisting as it is relentless, Cole weaves a tale of power and sacrifice, ripping apart the ivory facade to reveal the rot that lies at the heart of our most honored institutions. A tour—de—force that centers the academia in dark academia, An Arcane Inheritance is a must—read!”
– K. M. Enright, Sunday Times bestselling author of Mistress of Lies

Warren University started as a joke. Not to the founders—three vainglorious men who had been born with the world in their hands and their futures glittering like gold coins eager to be spent—but to the people of Hartford.

Colonized in the 1600s by the Dutch—whose belief in European expansionism was matched only by their inability to believe that the Algonquian tribes already occupying the land could be considered people—Hartford was, at different points in history, one of the wealthiest and one of the poorest cities in the United States. When the university founders began buying acreage, it was well on its way to rock bottom, barely surviving a flood in 1909, a fire in 1944, and, worst of all, immigration in the postwar decades.

Suffice to say, building a prestigious university on the west bank of the Connecticut River, directly opposite the eventual industrial sprawl of East Hartford, was truly ridiculous.

Trinity College, though not yet coeducational, already smugly occupied its new campus in Gallows Hill. The University of Hartford would not be built for another three years, but the University of Connecticut’s School of Law was already there and housing the Hartford Seminary as a bonus. Warren University was expected to be a social experiment that swiftly closed or merged with a more prestigious school.

The doors opened in 1954. The inaugural class was coeducational and integrated, thanks to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in May of that year. The first students walked a gorgeous three-hundred-acre campus of pristine lawns, curated parks, and neoclassical architecture, soundtracked by the distant yet ever- present chords of rushing river water, to learn social sciences and liberal arts from a university that would, by the end of the year, become the last member of the Ivy League.

And if some of those students disappeared before graduation, well…every college needs a ghost story.