SL Jarrell
About SL Jarrell
SL Jarrell was born into a military family and traveled the world as a child. After his father retired from the Army, his family settled in central Ohio. He graduated from there, joined the Air Force after high school, and worked as an avionics technician on F-111s. After leaving the Air Force, he worked as an aircraft electrician at Rockwell on B-1 bombers. In college, he met a supervisor from the LA Air Traffic Control Center who sparked his interest in becoming an air traffic controller, leading to a thirty-year career.
SL has always been fascinated by aviation. From his first flight in a Huey helicopter with his father to a flight in an airplane with his aunt, the budding pilot looked to the sky. He built and flew RC models until he decided to earn his private pilot's license for airplanes. Several years later, he earned a helicopter license and a flight instructor certificate. He and his friend Kurt bought his first aircraft, a C-150, to get his license; then they bought a Cherokee 235. Many years later, he finally bought his own helicopter: a 1954 Hiller named AVee; the same helicopter as in the story Eagle Wings Lodge.
Published Books
Eagle Wings Lodge
In the fall of 1944, First Lieutenant Joe Smith navigates a secret mission across a storm-cursed sky, ferrying a cargo of Nazi gold from war-torn Europe to San Francisco. When his B-24 bomber clips a mountain ridge and vanishes into the Sierra Nevada wilderness, he becomes one of history's forgotten ghosts—a mystery that will outlast him by generations.Decades later, Professor Hunter Smith—aviation archaeologist, instinctive dreamer, and Joe's great-grandson—returns to his family's Eagle Wings Lodge nestled above a high-desert lake. Between leading hiking tours, solving a military drone disappearance, and falling deeper in love with the brilliant and guarded Katie, Hunter begins receiving vivid, impossibly detailed dreams that carry him back into the cockpit of his great-grandfather's doomed bomber. The past is not just speaking to him—it is pulling him toward a discovery that will reshape everything he knows about his family, the lodge, and the woman he loves.Eagle Wings Lodge is a richly layered multigenerational saga that weaves World War II adventure, small-town secrets, and a tender love story into a gripping mystery of loss, legacy, and destiny. From the jungles of Brazil to the glaciers of Bolden Peak, from the quiet shores of Eagle Wings Lake to the frozen cockpit of a long-lost Mustang, every clue leads Hunter closer to the truth his great-grandfather never lived to tell.Part historical thriller, part family saga, part ghost story of the living and the dead, Eagle Wings Lodge is a sweeping, emotionally resonant novel about what we inherit from those who came before us—and what, perhaps, they have been waiting all along for us to find.