Alma Katsu

Alma Katsu spent decades working in American intelligence before writing full time, and the spy novels are the smaller part of what she does with that history. Red London, from 2023, follows the officer Lyndsey Duncan into the world of Russian money in Britain, continuing the story begun in Red Widow. The horror novels reach further back. The Hunger retells the Donner Party's winter crossing of the Sierra Nevada in 1846 as something worse than bad weather and bad judgement, while The Fervor is set in 1944 at Minidoka, the Idaho camp where Japanese American families were confined, and threads yokai out of Japanese folklore through it. Katsu is half Japanese and her husband's family were held at Topaz in Utah. Born in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1959 and raised near Concord, Massachusetts, she studied under John Irving at Brandeis, took a master's in fiction at Johns Hopkins in 2004, and published her debut, The Taker, in 2011.