The Scolaris Chronicles

In the city of Scolaris, knowledge is the only currency that matters. Beauty is forbidden. Creativity is a crime. And the Defectos who serve the ruling elite are worth less than the dust on the library shelves.

A walled, pentagonal city-state built around a Great Library and governed by a council called the Protectorate, where a mechanical voice broadcasts “Knowledge is King” at six every morning. Quill is a twenty-four-year-old Defecto servant with a feather-shaped birthmark on her cheek and no right to an education. When a professor is found murdered in the library and her master is arrested for it, she starts asking the questions nobody in Scolaris is permitted to ask.

Dystopian fiction with a fair-play murder mystery at its centre. Secondary-world world building, caste oppression, institutional corruption, and a heroine who earns her place rather than being handed it. No magic system, no collapsed Earth. A complete, invented civilisation.

Two novels and a prequel novella. Start with The Death of Knowledge.