About the Author

Terry Eckstein is currently the owner and president of a national recruiting company which he operates remotely from his home.  He has always loved to create stories.  “I would have loved to have had a career writing books, but knew I could not support a family on a writer’s income.” He didn’t begin writing his first book until he was 59 years old.

Raised in a little northern Minnesota community where he attended the same public school from kindergarten through his senior year, Eckstein was immersed in small-town values with its small-town problems. His family owned a department store where he first started working, getting paid by candy bars, when he was six years old. Once a teenager, he was interacting with customers and solving problems. He learned how to deal with different types of people and their various temperaments. It was the perfect environment to prepare him for his 50-year career in human resources—the inspiration for his first novel, HR: Behind Closed Doors.

After college, he worked some years as a business manager but mostly as a human resource professional. He was employed by a variety of companies, from smaller 20-person privately-owned businesses to large Fortune 500 companies with 1000s of employees. This experience provided him with plenty of story material to draw from. “I wanted to write a novel about my career in Human Resources, but before I took on the task of writing a novel, I decided to write some short stories about my family dogs.”

Family-Friendly THOMAS Short Story Series

The first two books, THOMAS: Gunshot in the Woods and THOMAS: Life with Judah, were initially written with the pen name Hank Thorson, the name of Eckstein’s maternal grandfather. As one of the main characters in the story, Hank Thorson tells the tale in the first person. A change in pen name was made in his most recent and third book, THOMAS: Hubbell House Adventures. Eckstein now uses his own name as the author, and it is written in the third person. Now THOMAS books 1 and 2 will also show Terry Eckstein as the author.

Adult Fiction HR Series

HR: Behind Closed Doors was inspired by events that happened during Eckstein’s career. He has more to tell. Currently, he is working on his next novel, HR: At Mayo Clinic. This book will take a new direction from his first novel, as will his subsequent sequels. His characters have much to accomplish and he is ruminating on three or four more HR novels.

Different Series, Same Characters

The THOMAS short stories and HR novels are two very different series, but they share the same cast of characters. Both series are fiction inspired by actual events. Most of the stories take place in and around Mantorville, a community Eckstein has come to love and cherish.