I understood that the one in california was no longer available and
the literature mentions no other landing sites. Can you give the names
of these sites so I can do some research.

Well the highlights a

Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Now the most commonly used site, but
in the early days of shuttle few shuttles landed here, as the runway
is concrete and of limited size (contrast with the dry lakebeds, which
are rather more forgiving if you overrun them). Landing here means
you don't need to ship the shuttle across country, which adds about $1
million in the case of an Edwards landing.

Edwards Air Force Base, California. Has been used for dozens of
landings, including most of them in the early years.

White Sands, New Mexico. One shuttle has landed he
http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/chron/sts-3.htm
The gypsum that it landed on turned out to gum up the works more than
expected.

Here's a list of possible landing sites from 1993:
http://www.angelfire.com/fl/Jacqmans/landing.html

Here's a list of TAL sites from 2001 (and a description of what TAL
is): http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/nasafact/tal.htm

There's a nice page
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/...ty/sts-els.htm
Undated, but seems to roughly match the KSC page where they overlap.

Nice page at:
http://yarchive.net/space/shuttle/sh...ing_sites.html
which claims that the list of emergency sites is confidential (! - I'm
curious about what "confidential" would really mean here).

(Most of these were the top hits from a web search for "shuttle
landing sites", so you wouldn't have had to look very far, just FYI).