Sinister

Radcliffe runs on appearances. Its families are old, its money is older, and the polish on the surface is maintained with some care. Petra Valentine has never fitted into any of it. She is there on the edges of a world that was not built for her, and she knows exactly how visible that makes her.

Sinclair Arnoult has the opposite problem. He is Radcliffe's golden boy, the star athlete and top student who wears the family name effortlessly, and the charm is convincing enough that almost nobody looks past it. One drunken mistake at a party binds him to Petra in a way neither of them planned, and the consequences arrive faster than either can manage.

Then the killings start, staged with a deliberateness that says somebody is following a script. Petra and Sin end up investigating together, and the trail leads them backwards, into the founding of the town and the society that has been quietly running it. A second timeline in the 1800s runs alongside the present, and the closer the two threads come, the harder it is for Petra to separate what Sin is hiding from what he is.

Sinister is a standalone dark academia gothic romance from Veronica Lancet, the USA TODAY bestselling author of Fairydale, published by Atria Books in August 2026. It is a long book, around 736 pages, with occult ritual, a secret society, an unplanned pregnancy and a romance that treats devotion and destruction as neighbours.