Karen Cleveland Books in Order

If you want her most talked-about starting point: Need to Know → Keep You Close.
If you love tense stories about mothers and their kids: Keep You Close → You Can Run.
If suburban paranoia and neighborhood secrets appeal to you: The New Neighbor.
If you prefer to read everything in publication order: Need to Know → Keep You Close → You Can Run → The New Neighbor.

Karen Cleveland is a former CIA analyst turned thriller writer whose novels put spies, parents, and impossible choices on the same page. She grew up in Florida and now lives in North Carolina with her husband and three children.

After graduating from the University of Florida, she headed overseas as a Fulbright Scholar to Trinity College Dublin, where she earned a master's degree in international peace studies. A second graduate degree in public policy from Harvard University deepened her focus on how governments respond to global threats.

From there, she took a path few novelists can claim, moving straight into the CIA.

Cleveland began her agency career working on Russia before joining the Counterterrorism Center, where she focused on threats connected to Pakistan and Syria. Over more than eight years, she wrote intelligence briefs for the U.S. president and senior officials, worked alongside an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, and earned more than a dozen performance awards.

Those years gave her an inside view of how high-level decisions filter down into the lives of ordinary families.

During her time at the CIA she also became a parent, juggling classified work with the demands of a young household. While home on maternity leave, she started drafting a story about a CIA analyst who uncovers a Russian sleeper cell that hits far too close to home.

That story became Need to Know, a novel in which Vivian Miller, a devoted mother and counterintelligence officer, discovers her husband's face in a secret dossier of Russian agents. The book went on to become a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, was published in many countries, and had its film rights optioned by a major studio with Charlize Theron attached to produce and star.

Cleveland has since written more standalone thrillers that explore similar fault lines between national security and family life. Keep You Close follows an FBI internal investigator who finds a loaded gun in her teenage son's closet and learns he may be tied to an extremist group. You Can Run pairs a compromised CIA analyst with a relentless journalist after a kidnapping forces a terrible choice, while The New Neighbor centers on a veteran intelligence officer whose quiet Virginia cul-de-sac may hide an Iranian asset known only by a code name.

Across her books, Cleveland leans on the technical knowledge she gained in government, but her stories are driven by emotion, not acronyms. Her protagonists are professionals who know the rules and then have to decide which ones to break when their careers, their countries, and their children are all on the line.

Now writing full time, she continues to mine her years inside secure facilities and briefing rooms for realistic details, while telling fast-moving stories that stay rooted in everyday worries about marriage, money, and raising kids. The result is a body of work that feels both intimate and global at once.