Nocticadia

Reeling from her mother's mysterious death, a tenacious first-year student arrives at Dracadia University, an ancient, forbidding school perched on a fog-wrapped island off the coast of Maine—an island rumored to be haunted by the exiled mental patients whose bones are said to whiten its shores. She has come chasing answers about the illness that took her mother, and about the secrets the university seems determined to bury.

Presiding over the midnight lab is Devryck Bramwell, the brilliant, coldly beautiful pathologist the students call Doctor Death. He has no patience for eager first-years, and every reason to keep his distance—but the pull between them is immediate, dangerous, and impossible to ignore. As their forbidden attraction deepens, so does the mystery, dragging them both toward a deadly secret at the heart of Dracadia.

Keri Lake's Nocticadia is a standalone dark academia gothic romance with a slow-burning, high-heat, age-gap central relationship and strong horror and gothic-mystery undercurrents. Atmospheric and morbid, it pairs a moody island campus with a forbidden professor-student romance and a body-count mystery.