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

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.

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?

It's 1945 on Avalon, Santa Catalina Island, "The coast of Hollywood". Yachts and fishing boats bob in water clearer than crystal, sunbathers bask on the white-sand beaches, and from the legendary Avalon Ballroom, the music of Freddy Martin's Orchestra fills the air. Three beautiful young women prepare to embark upon their life's journeys: Gerri will be an actress, everyone is sure of that; Maria a big band singer; and Maggie, the most beautiful of them all, will wed the perfect man.

Dark tragedy strikes the three Cray brothers: Two girls have been brutally torn apart by vicious beasts, and the countryside around Cray Manor blazes with the legends of the werewolf. No one believes that a man could have caused such horror. Gaye reluctantly answers her sister Susan's call for help, not wanting to see the man she'd once intended to marry. When she learns that Susan blames Walter Cray for the killings at Craywood, it seems as if the world is collapsing into insanity.

The old painting was done on glass, and found beneath the ruins of the ancient, decaying French mansion that Emily Hastings' sister, Irene, had inherited from the estate of the Marquis de Garac. The cold and distant Monsieur Philippe Gastion informed them that the painting was a forgotten masterpiece and should be given a place of honor. Soon afterward, Irene became mysteriously ill, and other signs of imminent danger pointed directly toward Emily.

Everybody Who's Nobody Goes There. The place is gaudy yet drab, lively yet death-like, dispassionate mother hen to a brood of dithered chicks. Discover its bizarre existence from the inside, through the muddled collective mind of the outcast in-group, a gay throng of third-sex bewildered ones who frantically seek a why -but must always settle for The Why Not.

Twenty-year-old Dennis Eastman has a choice to make: either enter the U.S. Naval Academy, or find some other course in life. He decides to spend his final month of freedom in Los Angeles with his old mentor and lover, Lincoln Gardner, hoping to find some answers. But Linc fails to meet him at the airport, and when Dennis enters his friend's apartment in Beverly Hills, he's promptly confronted by the police: Gardner has been brutally murdered!