The six years Traci Hunter Abramson spent as a CIA officer out of college gave her plenty of material for political thriller novels.
Abramson has a catalog of 45 books. The latest, “Victim #8,” will be released on Oct. 7.
The story follows Luke Steele, a military aide, who goes undercover with FBI special agent Aberlyn Reiner to investigate a conspiracy tied to a nuclear threat.
This is the second book in the Luke Steele series. The first was “Hometown Vendetta,” in which Steele and Reiner join forces and unravel a deathly conspiracy.
Abramson, a BYU graduate and a Latter-day Saint, is on a book tour. She traveled to Salt Lake City on Friday for a book signing event at Deseret Book in City Creek Center. She also stopped by Idaho Falls and Rexburg in Idaho before heading to Arizona.
Deseret News spoke to Abramson ahead of her appearance in Salt Lake City. She opened up about getting her start at the CIA, her writing process and her new book.
Deseret News: Let’s start with the obvious question. I’d love to know more about your time in the CIA and how that career translated into your writing.
Traci Hunter Abramson: I was actually very fortunate that I was recruited into the CIA right out of college.
DN: How were you recruited?
THA: It’s a crazy story. I got married in college. My husband’s family lived in Virginia, so the summer between our junior and senior years, we lived with his parents. Jobs were easier to get in Virginia than they were where I came from in Arizona.
The bishop of the ward where we were attending church was the recruiter that year. I saw (the CIA’s) posting at BYU but I didn’t qualify because they were looking for accountants and I graduated in finance.
The bishop ran into me and said, “Hey, I didn’t see you on my interview list.” He found out that I also studied international business with a minor in international relations. He told me he had an opening at 3 p.m.
The CIA loves schools like BYU and Texas A&M University, places where there’s a moral basis, where people are not going to have a lot of skeletons in their closet.
DN: Rumor has it the CIA is known to recruit members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. What was your experience like?
THA: The CIA becomes kind of like a second family because you can’t talk about what you do outside of the walls.
You have these really tight bonds. But if you’re walking down the street, you’re trained not to acknowledge someone from work, because what if they are undercover?
You also this need to have a backup plan, and you have a backup plan to the backup plan, and then a backup plan to that backup backup plan.
It does create a lot of depth to what I can do for characters, because if you haven’t lived that life, you don’t really understand it.
I had a more of an eagle-eye view than what a lot of the operatives did. On the administrative side, you know where the money goes.
Of course, (field agents) know the ins and outs of tradecraft better, where I wouldn’t have as much.
DN: Your writing offers a geopolitical layer to the story. How do you balance the act of writing about something that you can’t really talk about with the fictional world you’re building?
THA: The first few times I tried to put in a piece of something that was real, my editor would come back every time and say, “That’s not realistic.”
I was almost forced not to use real issues because nobody believes that they really happen.
It’s about making the story plausible. Like the shooting that just happened in Michigan. I have a book where a shooting happens.
Note: Abramson is referring to the attack on a Latter-day Saint church in Michigan, where four people were killed and five were wounded. Her book in question is “Redemption,” published in 2021, where she writes about an attack that targets a presidential candidate at a crowded venue.
THA: One thing I make sure I do is I write in people who were trained to deal with those kinds of situations.
Those characters try to help others follow logic. For example, when you run out in the event of a shooting, you should have your hands up so everyone knows you’re not a threat.
Sometimes I’m able to use my background and throw little tidbits where people know have a better understanding of the geopolitical situation that they might not have even known. Like, “Wait, where’s Lithuania?”
DN: And for “Victim #8,” you take readers to Turkey.
THA: It was fun writing about Istanbul. I’m pretty well traveled and I’d expected to see heavy Muslim influence in the region. I hired a tour guide to get the insider point of view. He told me this part is different from the rest of Turkey; it has so much international flavor. There’s a higher percentage of Christians in Istanbul than any other place in Turkey. I spoke to a few U.S. Christians living in Istanbul, too.
DN: Switching gears to your writing process. From what I understand, you discover the plot as you go. What does a day in your life as a novelist look like? Considering you are a mother to five and — are you a grandmother, too?
THA: Yes, four grandkids. I typically wake up and get on the treadmill for 45 minutes to an hour. I have this old AlphaSmart Neo, a keyboard with an LCD screen, that I write on. It doesn’t have anything that can distract me.
I’ve got one of the desk exercise bikes, and ideally, I’ll do another 45 minutes to an hour there. That gives me at least 1,000 of the 2,000 words I need to do for the day. Of course, it’ll take me six hours to get the other half done. (She laughed.)
But the first two hours make me feel productive.
I’ll write up through Friday night or Saturday morning, and then I will switch to either editing or proofreading. I don’t work on Sundays.
I usually have some basic setting in mind, and that’s kind of where I start.
DN: So you begin with a place, a room, a scene and go from there.
THA: In “Victim #8,” I didn’t even realize there was a serial killer element to the story until I was several chapters in.
It’s funny, I’m staying at Sarah Eden’s house. (An author friend of Abramson who has written more than 80 historical novels.) Sarah is the absolute opposite of me. Everything is plotted out.
I told my husband last night that I was struggling with writing my current project because I figured out what happens next. “I’m kind of bored. What am I going to do now?” I told him. He just kind of laughed at me.
DN: That’s so interesting that you use the word “bored.” Many known authors, including Stephen King, feel the same way, where they enjoy the process of figuring it out lot more. Do you ever lean on your faith to help you find inspiration?
THA: Oh, I’ve always felt the Lord has given us all gifts, and by recognizing where those gifts come from, we are entitled to use them fully.
There are times when I say, “All right, Heavenly Father, I need help. I’m hitting a block. I need to know where this is going.”
DN: It seems like sometimes the answer shows up on the page as long as you show up every day. Would you say that is your experience?
THA: It really is. You have to train your creativity.
When my feet hit the treadmill, my brain goes into motion and I start typing. Even if it’s not a great writing day, I’m still gonna have something on the page.
DN: You often include characters who are members of the church. How do you approach that and keep your writing clean, especially the romantic bits?
THA: When I started writing, I began with Latter-day Saint characters. That’s what gave them depth.
DN: Was morality a part of this depth?
THA: Yes, part of it is that. ... When you talk to different authors, they have core values. Like Sean Bessey’s is kindness. Esther Hatch’s is loyalty. Patriotism is one of my big ones.
As I was learning the craft, I wrote a book called “Chances Are.” Originally, the protagonist was a woman from India who converted to Mormonism. But I needed her to be by herself, and if you are a member of the LDS Church, you are never without help. Within a day of this roadblock, my editor reached out and asked if I would consider writing about something that wasn’t specific to the Latter-day Saint culture. “That was it,” I thought. I could make her Christian.
That’s really where my journey started shifting into more of a Christian worldview.
I’ve never felt the need to use language in my books. There may be times where something is under the breath or let out but I don’t need to show it. People can just fill in whatever they’re comfortable with.
It takes more effort to learn how to write a clean book but once you’ve developed the skills, it’s pretty effortless.
DN: Talk to me a little bit about what our readers should know about your latest novel. What are you most excited about for them to discover?
THA: We get to see a little bit more of the inside of the White House.
On TV, you see these beautiful, wide hallways with all the beautiful furniture and furnishings. Then you go into the military aide office, and it’s like a bunch of cubicles and blank walls — it’s a forgotten corner.
There are elements of overcoming trauma. I write about it realistically without getting too dark. A lot of the culture from Istanbul will be in this book.
The cover of the book is a picture I took in Turkey. The photo is the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul.
DN: That’s amazing. They added the shadows of two people running?
THA: Yes, they put the couple in and recolored it.
DN: Very cool and perfect for a political suspense novel. My final question is out of your very large catalogue of books, what do you recommend to our readers to start with?
THA: “Hometown Vendetta” is the one that comes before this. Its paperback releases the same day as “Victim #8,” on Oct. 7.
“Novel Threats” is another. It was released in April and is the beginning of another series of two CIA operatives infiltrating a New York publishing house.
There’s also “Failsafe,” which won the Whitney Award in 2015. It’s another romantic suspense story set in the serene beauty of Eastern U.S., namely Pennsylvania and Virginia.
For those interested in Latter-day Saint culture-related books, “Royal Target” is a good series option. It follows CIA agent Janessa Rogers, who gets engaged to a prince as a part of an assignment, but things get more complicated.