Though he started his writing career as an author of young-adult fiction, where the father/son conflict is a major theme, he is best known for his later novels of suspense, most of which are set, at least in part, in Italy, reflecting his academic background as a scholar of Italian culture.

[1] A later international thriller, Nine Days in October, came out of the author's course research on the forces of order and disorder in contemporary Italy[2] and follows a band of criminals and ex-terrorists as they attempt to carry out an assassination plot.

While his novels take place in the modern era, Terpening's academic research has focused on Italian authors of the Renaissance, most notably the Venetian Humanist Lodovico Dolce, although he has also published a study of the infernal boatman Charon and numerous articles on other writers of the 15th and 16th centuries.

[6] In his youth, Terpening held a variety of jobs while attending school and first beginning to write fiction: he serviced vehicles in a dairy, worked in a berry growers cannery, on a cement gang in construction, as a striper of panels in a Georgia-Pacific veneer plant, a crew dispatcher for Southern Pacific Railroad, a housekeeping aide in Herrick Hospital (Berkeley, California), a mail handler for the U.S.

His revised dissertation was later published as Charon and the Crossing: Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Transformations of a Myth (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985).

The illustrated book was the first comprehensive study of the underworld boatman Charon as found in the literary tradition from pre-Homeric texts through the early Baroque period in Italy.

[11] Author of numerous scholarly articles and reviews dealing with Italian and Spanish literature, he published his second academic book, Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance Man of Letters, in 1997.

[13] His scholarly articles deal with authors such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Angelo Poliziano, Pietro Bembo, Giordano Bruno, Miguel de Cervantes, and Giambattista Marino.

Barbara Conaty, writing in Library Journal, noted that “this thriller takes readers deep into the politics of Paraguay.”[27] She thought that Terpening “imbue[d] his main characters with psychological depth, infuse[d] the book with local color galore, and fashion[ed] a deft plot.” As for the plot, two Americans, a hydrogeologist from Arizona and a professor of German from Yale University, both visiting Asunción but originally unknown to one another, are inadvertently drawn into the middle of a conspiracy to overthrow the Paraguayan government.

[29] The editor wrote: Taking popular entertainment as a measure one might likely conclude that those laboring in the hydrology and water resources field lack glamor, sex appeal and heroic qualities.

Has any such character ever figured in plots on stage, screen, television or in books, to save the day, solve the mystery, woo the heroine and ride off into the sunset, or even to add spice and interest to a story?

[31] Christine Wald-Hopkins, a reviewer for the Tucson Weekly, noted this novel's affinities with the earlier League of Shadows, pointing out that the “malignant confluence of internal and external forces in contemporary Paraguay .

has its own fascist resonance.”[32] And the Midwest Book Review concluded: “Vivid, descriptive, imaginative, and chilling in its presentation of the lengths human beings will go to dominate one another, Tropic of Fear is an exciting thrill ride from first page to last.”[33] In 2007, Terpening published a contemporary international suspense thriller, Nine Days in October, “his most successful fictional foray into the murk of international crime.”[34] Jonathan Pearce (California State University, Stanislaus-Stockton), writing in Library Journal, says that Terpening “gets his latest book off to a slam-bang start in Rome with a botched heist by terrorists.

The sense of place is bolstered with such an abundance of native vocabulary and street and building names that Italophiles will feel right at home.” Terpening's next novel (August 2013) is an international thriller set primarily in Italy and Yugoslavia in the summer of 1984, four years after the death of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the authoritarian president of the Socialist nation.

Secondary episodes take place in Southern Arizona (Sierra Vista, Fort Huachuca, Tucson), Chicago, Moscow (Russia), and Benghazi (Libya).

Meanwhile, Vitali Alferyev, KGB station chief in Belgrade, has been recalled to Moscow, where his superior orders him to withdraw all covert operatives from the sector between Rijeka and Ljubljana.

The novel reaches its climax in the Yugoslav mountains, where Croatian terrorists, KGB spies, and NATO agents play out the final violent moves in a dangerous game to change the fate of Europe.

[37] The author's latest publication, The Hornets' Nest of Our Desires: The Artie Crenshaw Trilogy (August 2023), contains revised editions of The Turning and In Light's Delay, along with The Echoes of Our Two Hearts, previously unpublished.

The trilogy follows Artie Crenshaw as he embarks on a journey of self-discovery from a summer romance in a small Oregon town in 1962, to his college years abroad in Italy and later in Mexico, to his failed marriage and its aftermath in the 1970s.