Karna Small Bodman Books in Order

Karna Small Bodman came to fiction after spending years in newsrooms and in the White House, so her thrillers tend to feel like they were built from real meetings, real briefings, and real pressure. Before she wrote political suspense, she had already lived a lot of it.

She studied at the University of Michigan, then started in San Francisco as a television reporter and anchor for KRON and KGO. Later she moved to Washington, D.C., where she anchored the ten o'clock news on Channel 5, hosted a nationally syndicated program on business and economic issues, and led a three-hour news and talk radio show. She also did political commentary for ABC in New York.

That mix of deadlines, live microphones, and complicated stories turned out to be good training for a novelist.

When Ronald Reagan was elected, Bodman joined the administration as deputy press secretary to Jim Brady. She has said she met with the president almost daily, traveled on Air Force One, and was sent to South America and the Far East to speak about the administration's economic priorities.

Then her work moved deeper into foreign policy.

She later became senior director and spokesman for the National Security Council. In that role she attended arms control talks with the Soviets and traveled with the team that briefed the leaders of Great Britain, France, and Italy, along with Pope John Paul II. When she left government for a senior vice president role at a public affairs firm, she was the highest ranking woman on the White House staff.

For a long time, she had wanted to write novels. After years of writing news scripts, commentary, and policy papers, she finally turned that background into fiction, starting with Checkmate. That book introduces Dr. Cameron Talbot, a missile defense expert whose work collides with terrorism, Congress, and White House politics. It was followed by Gambit, which brings Cameron back for another high pressure national security crisis.

Bodman later shifted to Samantha Reid, a Homeland Security official at the center of Final Finesse, Castle Bravo, and Trust But Verify. Those books deal with pipeline sabotage, the threat of an EMP attack, and a bomb plot tied to financial panic. Readers who like her work usually come for the same things: capable women, plausible threats, a little romance, and a strong sense of how Washington works when the stakes are high.

She has also moved into children's books. Wrigley at the White House takes her firsthand knowledge of the building and turns it into a lighter story about twins, a puppy, and chaos in the president's home. More recently, Protecting Jess sends its danger to Brazil, pairing a White House economist with a covert CIA protector.

These days, Bodman has said she and her husband, Dick Bodman, divide their time between Naples, Florida, and Washington, D.C. She has also spent years on the speaking circuit, giving hundreds of talks and interviews around the country. Her fiction makes it clear that she never really stopped paying attention to how power works. She just found a more dramatic way to write about it.