Ron Terpening

I like writing thrillers (and teen novels) because they're so much fun to read. And I love reading. Reading's my favorite pastime whether it's a crime novel by Elmore Leonard or Dennis Lehane or a thriller by Nelson DeMille or Harlan Coben.

But I try a bit of everything--from teen lit to popular fiction, from so-called serious literary fiction by, say, someone like Wallace Stegner or Edward Abbey, to mainstream fiction by authors such as Pat Conroy, John Irving, and Larry McMurtry.

For more on writing, visit my blog: http://www.ronterpening.com/wordpress. And for my Facebook page, see: http://www.facebook.com/ron.terpening.9.

I recently finished a "Lifetime Reading List," which I've posted on my personal website (http://www.ronterpening.com). Arranged chronologically, the list contains nearly 3,000 novels. Unfortunately, it would probably take three lifetimes to read them all!

As for the standard bio: I was born in Bellingham, Washington in 1946 and was raised in small towns in Washington and Oregon. I graduated from Gresham Union High School (near Portland) and earned my bachelor's degree from the University of Oregon in Romance Languages (after spending my sophomore year abroad in Pavia, Italy), and my Master's and Ph.D. in Italian at the University of California in Berkeley. So that's why so many of my thrillers have Italian (and international) settings.

I taught for four years at Loyola University of Chicago (1978-1982) before moving to the University of Arizona, where I was a professor of Italian until I took early retirement in 2008.

I and my wife, Vicki, live in Tucson, Arizona, along with our tenth Golden Retriever and a Siberian Husky.