Terry Odell Books In Order

Publication Order of Blackthorne, Inc. Books

Publication Order of Mapleton Mystery Books

Publication Order of Pine Hills Police Books

Publication Order of Triple-D Ranch Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Terry Odell is a romantic suspense, cozy mystery, and general mystery novelist from Colorado. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California before she went on to live in Florida and now makes her home in Colorado. As a child, she does not remember learning to read but knows that she loves to read. According to her parents, they had to move from LA to Florida since she had finished reading all the novels in the local library. However, learning to write was a different matter even though she had always been a storyteller who never put words on paper. Many of her ideas were from movies, television shows, and books she believed she could improve with character changes and her own plot. As a young adult, she went to the University of California and Los Angeles and worked in the secondary school system in LA County where she was a teacher of high school science. She would then start writing training manuals and curricula and then discovered fan fiction. Unlike her technical writing, fan fiction was the best training ground that opened her eyes to her potential.

Odell’s entry into the world of fiction writing came about by mistake while she was already an adult. One day while her son was visiting, he happened to mention the Highlander TV show. Since she was a good mother, she began to watch the show and it was not long before she started reading fan fiction. Soon enough she was giving critiques to the stories written by aspiring writers and then one weekend she got the courage to pen her first short story. It was a type of MacGyver story that had been in her head for years which she reworked into a Highlander one. Upon sending the manuscript to a client whose work she had been editing, she guided her on how to fix her many noob mistakes. Now that she had thrown down the gauntlet, she had to learn the rules and take on the challenge of making the most of her new creative outlet. The Highlander fandom world loved her stories even though she thought she would be better off writing original characters. Ultimately she found the short story format too difficult to master and hence moved to long-form fiction.

Terry Odell published Finding Sarah, her debut novel, under Cerridwen Press in 2007. She published the novel at a time when publishers had their own online stores and Amazon KDP was not a thing. She would go on to publish three titles with Cerridwen Press even though the publisher would ultimately go under. The time she spent there provided her with feedback and she also learned a lot about how the business of writing ran. It was also during this time that she attended a conference where she met an editor from Cengage/Five Star who asked her to pitch to him. She would publish three of her Blackthorne series with Cengage before the company shut down its romantic suspense line.

Finding Sarah is a thrilling romantic suspense fiction work that Terry Odell published in 2007. The lead in the novel is Sarah Tucker who never imagined that she would be robbed at gunpoint. She also never thought she would fall for the detective who was assigned to the case. Her biggest dream is to make her gift boutique a success but at present, she is living hand to mouth. She lost her husband in a tragic accident a year earlier but the insurance company refused to pay saying it was a suicide. Full of guilt, Sarah also has to deal with all manner of business setbacks. She also has to deal with a former boyfriend pestering her to take his offer of financial assistance and a meddling sister-in-law too. What she does not know is that she is being set up for failure and soon she finds herself fighting for survival. Randy Detweiler, the police detective, believes the culprit is a thief who has given the police a runaround for months. But then he starts falling for Sarah the victim and begins to cross professional boundaries. When Sarah goes missing, he is afraid that he might never be able to save her despite all his detective skills.

Terry Odell’s second novel in the Pine Hills Police series Hidden Fire is even better than the debut. Randy Detweiler is back from a few months in the violent crime task force and cannot wait to go back to Pine Halls to be reunited with Sarah Tucker. However, what he does not know is that Sarah is thinking of leaving the relationship as she hates that he does not talk about his job and often gets called away at the most inopportune moments. Their long-awaited reunion is interrupted by the discovery of a dead body and it is feared that there is a serial killer abroad. Even worse, the police department might just get disbanded by the Town Council and Randy will have to work harder to solve the murder before they act. Forced to work undercover, Randy is struggling to balance a shaky relationship with work. As for Sarah, she thinks she means less to Randy with each passing day and is thinking of making him choose between their relationship and his job. But their relationship becomes even more interesting when she becomes a suspect in his case.

Terry Odell’s Saving Scott is a fascinating romantic suspense work with plenty of murder, mystery, and adventure. This is the story of bakery owner Ashley and Scott, the former police detective. Ashley has been having many setbacks in trying to open her bakery shop even though her contractor assures her that mishaps are a normal thing in business. However, she is not convinced and has bet everything on her business having a great start. Against her family’s wishes, she had left home, and her fiance and now needs to prove all of them wrong. Scott has been trying to run from the traumatic event that put an end to his detective career and forced him to take a job with the Pine Hills PD as a civilian consultant. His way of dealing with it is leaving it in the past as he focuses on just answering the phones at his new job and going home once his shift is done. He is not looking to get into any new relationships since it is too much baggage and effort when he runs into Ashley. Things get even more interesting since she happens to be his neighbor.