Author Terry Sanville
About the Author
Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his artist-poet wife (his in-house editor) and two plump cats (his in-house critics). He writes full time, producing novels, short stories, and essays. His work has been accepted by numerous literary and popular journals, magazines, and anthologies including The American Writers Review, The Bryant Literary Review, and Shenandoah. He was nominated four times for Pushcart Prizes and once for inclusion in Best of the Net Anthology.
Terry is a retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist, who once played with a symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George Shearing. His life as a fiction writer began in 2001. Since then, he has written and placed over 330 short stories including two story collections—“A lot more than Hemingway and Fitzgerald but a lot less than Chekhov,” he says, grinning. Other novels include Face-to-Face (2020) and The Misplaced (2024). He enjoys creating characters with imperfect bodies or minds that somehow make their mark and succeed or fail in memorable ways.
The Long Fall
Author: Terry Sanville
Hardback ISBN: 9798302643100
Paperback ISBN: 9798891263246
eBook ISBN: 9798891263253
Genre: Mystery
Release Date 12/31/2024
On Santa Catalina Island, a winter tourist discovers the scattered bones of two bodies on an almost-vertical mountainside, high above the town of Avalon. He contacts the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Sergeant Paul Saldano, the island’s watch commander, investigates.
How did the bones get there? Was it an accident? A double lovers’ leap? Or maybe murder? The discovery of a neat bullet hole in one of the bodies’ breastplate kicks Saldano’s investigation into high gear.
The County Corner estimates that the bones have lain on that mountainside since World War II. The recovery of a set of Army dog tags nearby takes our story back in time to the war years when civilian traffic to Catalina was cut off and the island occupied by the US military.
Sgt. Saldano enlists the help of Specialist Barbara Spencer, an Army records clerk in San Francisco. They become partners in trying to solve this eighty-year old mystery. Who were these people? Why did they die? Why are there no records of anything? Romance blossoms between the two investigators. And as we flash back to life on Catalina Island during WWII, we see love, fear, and jealousy are alive and well on this American outpost.
The Long Fall is a cold case mystery filled with historical intrigue and the clash of cultures. Its story twists and turns as much as the narrow road that climbs the mountain above Avalon, on Santa Catalina, the Island of Romance.
Deep Water Secrets
Author: Terry Sanville
Hardback ISBN: 9798252515359
Paperback ISBN: 9798891265479
eBook ISBN: 9798891265486
Genre: Mystery
Release Date 4/20/2026
Two hundred and ninety feet below the surface of the San Pedro Channel, just off the leeward coast of Santa Catalina Island, lies a secret. It’s been there for more than eighty years and should have remained undetected in its dim and silent world.
But California’s geology never rests. A strong earthquake shifts the crooked fault line that parallels Catalina and the SoCal Coast, creating a tsunami that crashes into the island’s town of Avalon. It wrecks shoreline shops, capsizes boats moored in Seven Moons Bay, and churns the sea bottom.
Sergeant Paul Saldano, the Sheriff’s Department’s on-island watch commander, responds to the emergency. A ferryboat captain gives Saldano some suspicious debris that has floated to the surface after the tsunami hit. The debris is set on a shelf and almost forgotten – until a deputy recognizes its possible origin and our story explodes.
Saldano and his deep-sea diving partner in love and crime, Jamella, begin their investigation with the help of her tweener daughter, Lisa. Jamella’s near-death dives expose a poignant story that dates back to World War II when the U.S. military occupied Catalina Island. But her underwater adventures also attract corrupt salvage divers who only see dollar signs in ravaging the secret. And they’re willing to hurt others and tempt death to gain the rewards.
Come discover what is so important that lies in the deep water off Catalina Island that’s worth human life and suffering.
