Lucy Banks Books in Order

If you want the main paranormal series: The Case of the Green-Dressed Ghost → The Case of the Deadly Doppelganger → The Case of the Hidden Daemon
If you want to continue the larger arc: The Case of the Twisted Truths → The Case of the Secret Spirit-Half
If you want a darker standalone ghost story: The Hanged Man and the Fortune Teller
If you prefer psychological suspense: Caged Little Birds → The Depths

Lucy Banks grew up in Hertfordshire, and she sounds like the kind of reader who was never far from a pile of books. As a child she spent long stretches in libraries and at car boot sales, building the kind of homegrown collection that turns casual reading into a lifelong habit.

She was writing early, too.

Before fiction became her main lane, Banks taught English literature to teenagers. Later she set up her own copywriting company and made a career out of words, even while the bigger ambition, writing novels, kept tugging at her sleeve.

That mix of practical writing and private imagination seems to matter. She has described writing fiction in the small hours, fitting it around work and family life, and that sense of persistence runs through her career.

A first big break came in 2016, when her children's story Sol the Slug's Night Before Christmas won Amazon's A New Night Before Christmas competition. It was a very Lucy Banks sort of idea, warm, funny, a little odd, and rooted in something close to home. The inspiration came from the slugs that appeared in her Devon house each winter, which tells you a lot about the way she looks at the world.

Another turning point came through a creative writing course at Exeter College.

During a classroom character exercise, Banks came up with Dr Ribero, an elderly Argentinian detective with a cane and a spectacular moustache. The character stayed with her, grew stranger, and eventually became the center of The Case of the Green-Dressed Ghost, her first novel, published in 2017. That book launched the Dr Ribero's Agency of the Supernatural series, with its nervous hero Kester Lanner, chaotic ghost-hunting jobs, and wonderfully matter-of-fact approach to the paranormal.

Readers who enjoy Banks's fiction often seem to like that balance. In The Case of the Deadly Doppelganger and The Case of the Hidden Daemon, she blends creepy folklore, oddball team dynamics, and the feel of southwest English towns where history never quite stays buried. The books are funny in places, but they also care about grief, family tension, and what fear does to ordinary people.

She can go darker when she wants to.

Her standalone The Hanged Man and the Fortune Teller leans into memory, loss, and the loneliness of being trapped between worlds. Then Caged Little Birds and The Depths move toward psychological suspense. These books keep her gift for atmosphere, but trade the comic energy of Dr Ribero for claustrophobia, secrecy, and narrators who may not even be telling themselves the truth. If you like fiction where houses, coastlines, and old guilt all seem to press in at once, that is a big part of the appeal.

Place matters in her work. Banks moved from Hertfordshire to Devon after marrying a man from Taunton, and she has said she loved the southwest long before that. You can feel it in her settings, from seaside Lyme Regis to darker, moodier stretches of moor and coast, where folklore and landscape seem to lean on the story together.

In 2021 she won the Devon Prize for her story The Shuck, another neat sign of how naturally local myth and unease fit her imagination. Today she lives in Devon with her husband, two children, and a very boisterous cat. It also seems safe to assume there are still a lot of books in the house.