Jeff Bond is an American author of popular fiction. His books have been featured in The New York Review of Books, and The Pinebox Vendetta received the gold medal (top prize) in the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards. A Kansas native and Yale graduate, he now lives in Michigan with his wife and two daughters.

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As a student at Yale, I told friends I wanted to write a novel. I’d grown up racing through all the Clive Cussler and Margaret Truman in my suburban Kansas City grade-school library, and college was introducing me to War and Peace and The Corrections, characters so real I felt the author—from centuries ago, thousands of miles away—plucking thoughts straight from my own head.

The insights in these denser books dazzled me, but I missed the pure adrenaline rush of the thrillers I’d read as a boy. Could a story do both? Could breakneck plots coexist with living, breathing characters? I wanted to give it a shot.

I took a regular job out of school. Soon I started writing novels on the side, giving zero thought to who’d read them or what genre I was working in. I finished a too-long manuscript about classmates in their first real jobs. A basketball story. An adventure of three mismatched heroes rescuing the world from anarchist-hackers. They weren’t good yet, but each was an improvement on what’d come before.

Meanwhile, life rolled on. I held day jobs as a consultant, business analyst, teacher, and programmer. I lived on both coasts and ended up in the middle. (Michigan.) I wrecked an ankle playing too much basketball. I got married. I shepherded two daughters into elementary school—a gig that’s made me a soccer coach, gymnastics parent, and winder of ponytails.

Through it all, I wrote.

It’s taken a few detours, but I believe I’ve finally arrived at the stories I imagined writing in school. Most fall under the broad category of “character-based thriller” and feature unique premises that don’t fit neatly into a sub-genre like spy or detective. The exceptions would be my new Franklin series (The Cleaner, Two Teachers, The Parent War), which is more slice-of-life and literary in nature.

Even in Franklin, though, readers should expect to find action, big reversals, and heroes they care about. Themes that lurk below the surface of my works include ambition, class, parenting, corporate culture; but—always—a great story comes first.

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