KJ Howe Books in Order

K.J. Howe was born in Toronto, Canada, then spent much of her early life on the move. Her father worked in international telecommunications, and the family lived in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Caribbean.

That kind of childhood meant new countries, new cultures, and plenty of time spent looking for the next book to read. Howe has said that reading wherever she lived made her want to build stories of her own.

She attended school in Austria, Switzerland, and Canada before earning a business degree from the University of Toronto. Her first career was in the corporate world, but travel, adventure, and storytelling kept pulling at her attention.

Eventually, she made a deliberate change. Howe returned to school and completed a master's degree in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University. Along the way, she also worked as a medical, health, and fitness writer, learning how to research carefully and explain complicated material in clear language.

That research habit became central to her fiction.

For her Thea Paris novels, Howe looked closely at the world of kidnap and ransom response. She spoke with former hostages, negotiators, reintegration specialists, special forces operatives, and insurance professionals who work with kidnapping cases. The result is a pair of international thrillers that keep one foot in the practical work of bringing people home and the other in personal, family-level stakes.

Her debut novel, The Freedom Broker, introduces Thea Paris, a kidnap negotiator whose work becomes painfully personal when her father is taken. In Skyjack, Thea faces a hijacking while escorting two children toward a new home. Readers who like urgent missions, far-flung settings, family secrets, and a capable lead with real vulnerabilities will find those elements at the center of both books.

Howe's own travels have clearly fed her interest in place and risk. She has raced camels in Jordan, surfed in Hawaii, dived with great white sharks in South Africa, studied modern combat in the Arizona desert, and worked with elephants in Botswana.

She also has a major behind-the-scenes role in the thriller community. Howe became executive director of ThrillerFest, the annual gathering organized by International Thriller Writers, and has helped bring writers and readers together around the genre. Her work has earned multiple Daphne du Maurier Awards for mystery and suspense writing, and The Freedom Broker was a finalist for the 2018 Thriller Award for Best First Novel.

Home is Toronto, though Howe has made it clear that staying still has never been the whole plan. Tennis, cycling, swimming, travel, and the search for the next adventure remain part of her life.