Showing results by author "Victor J. Banis" in All Categories

"Doctor," he said before he said anything else, "I am haunted. By ghosts." His parents are brutally murdered in a Manson-like intrusion and Calvin narrowly escapes the same fate. He spends time in an expensive private mental hospital, but when he returns home, he senses the presence of evil in the shadowy old mansion.

The year is 1955. Spiro Dimopolous is his name, an 18-year-old Adonis fresh off the boat from Greece. Spiro's mother had been an American, and now that's she is ill, the lad's been dispatched to his cousins at Rawley's Landing, Kentucky, to make his way in the Brave New World of America. There he encounters crusty old Uncle Winston Rawley, patriarch of the clan, and Leticia, trying to hold together the family farm, and Branston 'Bran' Rawley, the handsome young scion of the next generation.

The hospital says it was an accident. Patience Pendleton says someone is trying to murder her father - but who? Her demented twin, Prudence? Or Farley, the jilted fiancee, who thought he would be marrying money? Or Zack, the queer brother threatened with disinheritance? Or, might it be the ghosts of past evil...? Book 5 in the Deadly Series.

Nothing bad is supposed to happen in Palm Springs. At least that's what San Francisco private detective Tom Danzel and his partner, Stanley Korski, believe. But when their friend Chris finds a dead body in his hotel room bed, Tom and Stanley drive out to help the local police investigate. What they discover is a gangster's plot, a rather nasty green snake, and an elegant hotel that offers delicacies not usually found on a room service menu.

The police say "involuntary manslaughter" but a tragic accident turns out instead to be murder, plain and simple. And San Francisco Homicide Inspector Stanley Korski, on leave from the force and his unrequited love for fellow detective Tom Danzel, walks right into a murderer's web of treachery. Wrong, Stanley. Deadly wrong.

The House of the Dead: a mortuary whose directors are drop dead gorgeous and terminally horny - and one of them up to mischief. Stanley and Tom try to separate the naturally dead from the murdered dead and find themselves awash with coffins - until they come to the one with Stanley's name on it. Deadly Slumber indeed.

A painful past. A mysterious stranger. Footsteps vanishing in the fog. All Stanley wants is just to hear Tom say, "I love you." All Tom wants is Stanley safe. And the stranger? Ah, there's the rub - what exactly is it that he wants? Be careful what you wish for, fellows. You may get it. Dreams can be deadly. This is the third book in the Deadly Mystery Series.

Straight cop, gay cop, and a woman who "isn't real". Tom and Stanley are on the trail of a drag queen serial killer, and along the way, they find themselves engaged in a more intimate pursuit, trying to resolve another mystery: their unexpected attraction to one another.

An amusing and entertaining story told in the first person by Paul, an ex-gay trying desperately to go straight. In fact, he's a couple of weeks away from marrying the boss' daughter when the saga opens...until Paul's former lover, Lorin, suddenly appears. This might seem trouble enough - but Lorin has been dead for the past five years!

It begins with a chance meeting in a bar... Temporarily homeless, Neal MacIntyre is invited by a charitable stranger to spend the night at his apartment. "I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone else," Neal says to his new acquaintance. "I always thought of myself as an honest man. I would have said a man of principle..." And with those words, Neal introduces an eerie tale of betrayal that leads to murder...

From childhood Peggy had loved her adopted sister, Allison, with a protective warmth that could only have come from a true Leo. When Allison disappears from the family lake cottage, Peggy must call on her last ounce of strength and will to overcome the terror that confronts her at every turn.

Part autobiography, part a history of the Gay Revolution, part writing manual, part juicy gossip, with a few tasty recipes thrown in for good measure, Spine Intact, Some Creases is a summing up - alternately hilarious and touching, instructive and impassioned, and always entertaining - of the remarkable life and work of a writer hailed by top gay pulp historian Michael Bronski as "one of my heroes."

Something dark and mysterious haunts the halls of stately Green Willows. Village gossip says it's the ghost of Jonathon Tremayne's wife, the beautiful and saintly Angela, who was treacherously murdered here. Pretty Mary Kirkpatrick, hired as governess to Jonathon's only child, Elizabeth, quickly finds herself falling in love with the handsome master of Green Willows, and discounts the gossip - until the night she finds herself confronted with a ghostly apparition!

When Liza Durant is saved from drowning by Jeffrey Forrest, she little realizes how much this chance meeting will change her life. For Jeffrey is the heir both to a large business, and to the great estate that lies near it, dominated by the old manor house called La Deuxième - “The Second.” Within days he proposes to the beautiful young woman; she neither accepts nor declines, but says that she'll visit him at his country home. But Jeffrey's father is killed, Jeffrey's so-called accidental death soon follows, and Liza finds herself enmeshed in a web of intrigue.

Late in the 21st Century - ravaged by the deadly Sept virus, the one-time United States has disintegrated into The Fundamental Christian Territories, where Catholics, Baptists, and Jews are registered as heretics, and gays are herded into walled ghettos: the Zones of Perversion. Harvey Milk Walton, a runner, finds his way to the ghetto in Angel Land, oldest of the territories, where a legend says that his long-ago-martyred namesake will return one day to lead his people to freedom - but even to speak of freedom, of leaving the FTC, is punishable by death.

Maggie Berke, the greatest of Hollywood's great stars, retired at the height of fame and glory to devote herself to her son's burgeoning career as a child star. Then tragedy struck. Twenty years later, her niece Mari Andrews comes to visit and finds her aunt haunted by the ghost of her lost child, teetering on the brink of madness.

When Jason moves with his partner Peter, a model and actor, to live with Peter's father in Los Angeles, he thinks the former Hollywood stuntman, Alders, is as ugly as a monkey. But there is much more to Peter's father than his funny face. Soon, Jason comes to appreciate that brains, as well as passion and masculine energy, can be sexy, too.

Jeannie Dalton battles the nightmares from her past to learn if her sister's death on this haunted island was an accident - or murder. A gothic novel from Victor Banis, author of nearly 200 novels and too many short stories to count.

Karen married Alan after a whirlwind courtship and returned with him to the cliffside house next to the lighthouse he tended. She believed she was his first wife, not knowing of the macabre death his first wife had suffered. Then she began to hear strange rumors about the house, and about her husband. The truth lay hidden behind a locked door, and in a scrap of rose point lace. A novel by Victor Banis, author of nearly 200 novels and too many short stories to count.

Delbert Mason has it all - or so it seems. His career is a success, and he is an important man in his small town. His future is mapped out. He knows just where he's going.

Until the night he strolls home late and sees a hearse and a limousine pull into the local cemetery. Who were those strange men by the hearse, and whose grave was that being dug nearby?