Dakota Banks has written scifi and thrillers (under a different name) but turned to fantasy when she “felt hemmed in by reality.” She lives on the western fringe of St. Louis, Missouri with her husband and two cats. Their two sons, one adopted from Peru and the other from Ethiopia, are in college. Read an excerpt of 
Dark Time by Dakota Banks
Dark Time by Dakota Banks is a technothriller disguised as an urban fantasy. For it to reach its ideal audience, it should instead be titled something like “The Anu Tablet” and have an ominously lit historic building on its cover.
The story begins in colonial times, when Susannah Layhem is accused of witchcraft and sentenced to burn at the stake. (Never mind that nobody was burned as a witch in the American colonies; they were hanged.) As she is dying, she is whisked away to a strange underworld and approached by a Sumerian demon, Rabishu. He offers to save her and make her immortal — if she agrees to become an assassin in his service. She accepts. Three hundred years later, Susannah has a moral crisis and decides she wants out of the killing business. There’s only one loophole in her contract: she will be free of Rabishu, and granted entrance to paradise... Read More
