Spy novelist LM Reynolds has never worked in the intelligence field herself, but she’s met a few undercover agents.

“I really started getting interested in it when I was flying. I would see people with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists,” says Reynolds, who spent many years working at Pan American World Airways. “I just found the whole thing fascinating.” She spent several years living overseas and would often find herself speculating about who among her fellow expatriates was a spy. (She eventually learned that several were, and they were usually not the ones she suspected.) Now she invents her own spies, some toting briefcases and others smuggling weapons, and sends them to exotic destinations and on dangerous assignments. 

One Deliberate Act, the third book in Reynolds’ series of spy novels, is a present-day story that connects to the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The discovery of a hidden SD card full of photos confirms intelligence operative Cat Powell’s suspicion that her friend Maggie Marshfield’s death was not an accident, and she heads to Sarajevo to untangle decades of secrets and betrayals. The tension remains high at every turn:

Seven miles into the journey, the convoy ground to a halt, and Zlatan heard men shouting outside their vehicle. Serbian forces frequently set up blockades on the roads and demanded payment for passage. The stops were nerve-racking, because the Serbs had been known to kidnap members of the UN force. He cowered inside the truck, both grateful for, and fearful of, the American passport in his possession. He could become a prize to be held for ransom, or executed as a warning against American intervention.

“This gripping, well-written narrative drops in a handful of surprises, like unexpected deaths, and culminates in a denouement both gratifying and realistic,” Kirkus Reviews concluded.

As Reynolds got to know people who worked in intelligence, she was most intrigued not by the high drama of it, but by the way it shaped her friends’ inner lives. One woman lived her cover story so fully that Reynolds was shocked to find out it was a facade. “I look back at the life that she had to lead, which was very secretive, and she had to compartmentalize everything,” Reynolds says. “I’ve always felt that it must be really difficult for people to have to put up those walls and not be able to discuss things with the people they care about.”

Reynolds’ own career, before she became a writer, had no such limitations. She began as a flight attendant in the 1970s—in a different world, she notes, remembering that the recruiter asked if her parents knew what she was up to—and seized every opportunity to travel, even beyond her regular routes. “I wanted to see as much of [the world] as I possibly could,” she says.

When she met and married a Pan Am employee stationed in India, the combination of geography and the strict rules for flight attendants convinced Reynolds it was time to adjust her career path, and she moved to Pan Am’s corporate side, training new flight attendants and writing the curriculum. She also started learning about computers. Although computers were still a novelty in the 1970s and early ’80s, her husband brought new ones home regularly and passed his old machines along to Reynolds. (She, in turn, gave her old computers to her son, who, she says, “now works at Google, so that apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”)

Reynolds brought her technology skills into the workplace, streamlining her department’s workflow. “I started taking my computers into the training department and taught people how to use them. Pretty soon we didn’t have to send things off to the word processing department.” Along with teaching flight attendants, she was soon developing training programs for IT.

Eventually, she set up her own technology training and consulting business. She enjoyed both the problem-solving nature of the work—“I likened it to doing the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle every day. There’s always a solution,” she says—and the fact that being the boss meant she could set her own schedule, taking long breaks to continue doing the traveling she loved. “I was running my own business, and I could call my own shots,” she says, like deciding to take her son on a six-week drive through the Western U.S. to celebrate his eighth grade graduation. 

As she moved from flying to training to technology, Reynolds was always writing. “Somewhere along the line I started jotting down little things,” she says. She found that she particularly enjoyed inventing stories about people she encountered, both strangers she saw in passing and friends whose careers in intelligence meant they couldn’t share much. “They were very good at keeping secrets. I found that fascinating,” she says. “I started inventing stories about what they were doing.”

When she stepped back from her technology work—IT “is a young person’s game,” she says, although she remains active in tech—Reynolds turned her attention more seriously to writing, developing her jottings and imaginings into fully realized novels. “There’s generally a historical component to my books, something from the past that drives something that’s happening today,” she says. “A lot of it comes from my imagination, stories that I’ve read over the years,” combined with significant research to make sure even the smallest details, like the tablecloths used in a particular restaurant, are correct. “Those little pieces add credence to the story,” she says. “My locations have to be spot-on. I don’t guess about that.”

The one thing Reynolds doesn’t do in her pursuit of accuracy is ask her spy friends, who are now retired, to vet the tradecraft in her books. “They read my work,” she says, but only for fun. “We all agree that it is fiction, and as long as it’s plausible, they’ll go for it.”

Sarah Rettger is a writer and bookseller in Massachusetts.