For Your Guilt-Free Reading Pleasure
The Girls on the Row • Patchwork • Tart Tales: Elegant Erotic Stories • The Darkroom • Mr. Right
About Carolyn Banks
The Girls on the Row
All kinds of young women flock to Washington, D.C., for all kinds of reasons. Few know the dangers that await them.
The Girls on the Row brings disparate people together in a block of houses on Capitol Hill. The familiar residents inhabit a world that is friendly and casual. When Claire moves in, she chooses a house where a murder had occurred. Claire is rich, beautiful and kinky. Fascination among the residents eventually morphs into resentment. Things only get darker from there.
Inspired by a true story.
Patchwork
What would be worse than imagining that your own son wants to kill you?
A divorced, single parent, Rachel’s relationship with her son Drew is an endless round of arguments and nagging. Drew has recently been released from a home for disturbed adolescents. When Rachel's ex-husband is found murdered, his mutilated body is wrapped in a patchwork quilt. Is their son Drew the killer? Could Rachel be his next target? Or are things really as they seem?
You the reader will experience this story from the alternating perspectives of Rachel and Drew. Before you come to the end of Patchwork, you may find yourself forced to choose between them.
TART TALES: Elegant Erotic Stories
When women close their eyes and smile, what do they dream? Tart Tales is a collection of short stories by Carolyn Banks, promising sex where and when you least expect it. Sly and sexy like a red satin sheet, slipping slowly across your thighs.
There are 27 tales, with characters that range from Martha Washington to the devil himself. A sculpture in a museum comes alive. A can of pest spray sparks an erotic episode. A fitness instructor bursts out of the television screen to talk about the infidelity she's witnessed downstairs.
"These stories do what I meant them to do," Banks says. "They titillate, they amuse. They illustrate that sex is a long way from sleaze."
The Darkroom
In The Darkroom, William Holland is an unwitting victim as well as a savage murderer. When he meets Carol Neal and her young sons, he sees a chance to recreate the family he murdered—a sort of atonement that even he does not understand. Carol, overwhelmed by single parenthood, talks herself out of her growing suspicions.
Carolyn Banks based the character of William Holland on the high-profile case of Bradford Bishop, the State Department official who, in 1976, murdered his mother, his wife, and his three children in their suburban Maryland home. Allegedly, Bishop loaded the five battered bodies into the family station wagon and drove all night to a wooded grove in North Carolina. There, he dug a pit, dumped the remains of his loved ones, doused them with kerosene and set them afire. Smoke from the fire was spotted and the bodies were discovered and identified. Bradford Bishop, however, was long gone.
Initially the FBI said Bishop had died in the Great Smoky Mountains, where the station wagon was abandoned. After several sightings, mostly abroad (Bishop had a diplomatic passport) the FBI's opinion was revised. In 2014, Bradford Bishop was placed on the FBI's Most Wanted List and CNN featured the Bishop family murders on its show, "The Hunt." That was when author Carolyn Banks, intrigued by the level of rage and detachment that Bishop exhibited, decided to revive her novel, The Darkroom. The book creates a possible motive for the brutal killings.
Mr. Right: A Smartass Parafeminist Psycho-Erotic Thriller
Mr. Right is a novel that defies categorization, at once scary, erotic and very funny. It is a measure of the book's spell that at the precise moment it has us on the edge of our seats, it can still make us laugh out loud.
"In her introduction to this new edition of her first novel, Banks tells us that when the manuscript was making its rounds two decades ago, one reader labeled the book 'a smartass parafeminist psycho-erotic thriller.' Banks goes on to say, 'You can tell that times have really changed, because now it can be that officially, with those words right smack on the cover'—and indeed they are.
After 20 years of other openly erotic and outspoken heroines, does this novel stand out as anything but a historical genre icon? The answer is a qualified 'yes.' Banks's heroine, Lida, is a fully realized and very sympathetic character, too smart for her job of teaching English at a community college in the Washington, D.C., area and constantly looking for love in the wrong places. That her Mr. Right turns out to be a reclusive novelist and self-confessed murderer works well as a plot device.
Banks's eye for details of character and relationships was sharp even then: 'Jerry's big voice filled the hall. He was an associate professor in the Geography Department and spoke every word as if it had seismic significance.' The sex scenes are indeed erotic, if not particularly startling. The only part of the novel that comes across as dated, in fact, is its 'parafeminist' agenda. Today, it's common knowledge that women want good sex on their own terms--a knowledge spread in part through novels such as this one." --Publishers Weekly
About Carolyn Banks
Carolyn Banks was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., She went to a Catholic grade school and, like all little Catholic girls, wanted to be a nun. She was 11 when she first saw her name in print (attached to a Letter to the Editor that she'd written) in the Pittsburgh Press. Immediately, she abandoned all spiritual leanings. Now she wanted to be a writer.
As a writer, she was always writing little vignettes and dropping them here and there around the house. Mostly these focused on some disaster she was facing. She was losing her hearing. She was losing her eyesight. She had 30 days to live. She imagined herself into all these situations and wrote about them with adolescent angst and zeal. She remembers hearing her mother say to her father, "Look, Phil. Now she has leprosy."
She took Creative Writing in college and her teacher told her, over and over again, she ought to write a novel. A couple of years after graduation she was the editor of Horse Play, a monthly equestrian magazine. One night she drank too much wine and called the teacher, asking, "Do you still think I could write a novel?" He said "No," adding, "If you had it in you, you'd have done it by now."
Carolyn hung up on the man and began work on her first novel, Mr. Right.
His "no" activated what Carolyn describes as her "Oh, yeah?" impulse: "a desire to show those who underestimate me that they're wrong. " Although Mr. Right has a lot of sex in it, I think of it as an innocent book. I wrote it without any knowledge of the publishing industry. The one editor (out of about 20) who liked it kept screaming at me. "What is it? Is it a mystery? Is it a women's book? What part of a bookstore would it be shelved in? And," she accused, "it's funny! Funny! I like it, but..."
Banks says Mr. Right "contains all of what I like to write about. I like to be funny. I like to be (safely) scared. I like intelligent banter, like having fun with language. I think that aspect, the banter, is called 'stichomythia,' and I like knowing oddball scholarly stuff like that." Mr. Right was written in the age of Aquarius. Unfortunately, it was published in the same month Fear of Flying hit bookstores."
Her agent and her editor kept saying, "Enough with the funny already." Three serious suspense novels followed: The Darkroom, The Girls on the Row, and Patchwork. In between, Banks began to review true crime books for The Washington Post and Crimebeat magazine. "I was up to my eyeballs in gore," Banks said, "I was on the beach, relaxing, reading a particularly graphic book about John Wayne Gacy. That did it for me. I didn't want to be wallowing in books about real murders and really ugly stuff."
She turned to what she calls, "murder tra-la," writing a lighthearted mystery series featuring a amateur sleuth who blunders into trouble. Banks hopes to put the five novels in this series into an omnibus edition soon. Robin's passion is horses and her sport of choice is dressage. These books were published by Fawcett and reissued by Amber Quill Press. The titles are Death by Dressage, Groomed for Death, Death on the Diagonal, A Horse to Die For, and Murder Well Bred.
After a long hiatus, Banks has just finished a new novel, Certain Children, not yet available.