The Death Knot - by Carolyn Banks (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Eleanor Armitage has isolated herself in the small town where she's chosen to live. Her job selecting fabrics for a designer makes it possible for her to work and travel without much personal contact with others. She's not unhappy; she's just, by desire, totally disengaged from what we would consider "normal" life. But when Eleanor witnesses a particularly ugly crime, that event pulls at her and, as she follows various aspects of what she has seen, she's released from her self-imposed prison and welcomes friendship and even romance.

Review Quotes

"'Before the murders, ' says Eleanor Armitage, 'I was just sort of waiting to die. I wasn't terminally ill and I certainly wasn't suicidal, but there was nothing going on in my life, nothing to keep me interested.' There's a couple of past traumas that have sent her into this depression, one recent and one going back to her teenage years, but she's too numb to think about either. An invisibly respectable middle-aged woman in the tiny Texas town of Lost Pines, Eleanor has no human contact except for casual acquaintances she has met on her daily strolls (prescribed by the doctor who also issues her Citalopram) along a local river path. All that changes when she happens upon one of those acquaintances, an elderly gent named Farley, beating a teenage boy to death with his cane.

So the first question is not who or how, but why; hence, uncommon mysteries unfold. Farley, a retired schoolteacher, has always had clairvoyant insight into the futures of "certain children" he has taught--and now can demonstrate peculiar knowledge of Eleanor's past. As she learns more, the question arises, could a clairvoyant actually provoke an assault he's foreseen by trying to preempt it? Can a once-conjoined twin sympathetically experience the murder of his brother, for which he was not present, as though it happened to himself? In the unraveling of these Escherian involutions, Eleanor begins a promising friendship with Connor Randall, a local policeman who lends his expertise to her unofficial investigation and is able to loosen some strangling knots in her own past.

The Death Knot is a brain-twisting mystery with a dash of romance and real literary flair; it also overlaps the cozy category in a distinctly marketable way."
-- Madison Smartt Bell, an American novelist and author of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution

"The Death Knot is a novel that will delight readers looking for something new, something thrilling and surprising. I read a lot of thrillers and mysteries, but Banks has pushed the envelope into something stranger, wilder, braver. One of the early twists was exhilarating, immediately altering the journey... and not for the last time. I read the book in one sitting, avidly awaiting the next discovery."
-- William Browning Spencer, author of Zod Wallop and Looking Out for Eleanor

About the Author

Carolyn Banks has a long and continuous record of publication. Her first novel, Mr. Right, was hailed as " hilarious and sexy at the same time." Suspense novels followed, including Patchwork, The Girls on the Row and The Darkroom. Afterward, Banks wrote a five-book comic mystery series set in the equestrian world. These were Death by Dressage, Murder Well Bred, Death on the Diagonal, Groomed for Death and A Horse to Die For. The series was reprinted in 2023 by Sapere Books in England, In 2024, Banks's farcical novel featuring Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Erica, appeared.