M.P. Woodward

M.P. Woodward is an American thriller writer who spent years as a U.S. Navy intelligence officer with Indo-Pacific Command, writing wargame scenarios and working alongside Special Forces, the CIA, and the NSA across deployments in the Persian Gulf and the Far East, before a second career in television and streaming that included executive roles at Amazon Prime Video. He brought that intelligence background directly into fiction with his 2022 debut, The Handler, an espionage thriller that launched an ongoing series continued in Dead Drop (2023). Woodward was subsequently chosen to write within Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan universe, authoring the Jack Ryan Jr. novels Shadow State, Line of Demarcation, and Terminal Velocity, and has since moved up to writing the flagship character himself in The Coldest War, a Jack Ryan novel due in late 2026. He has also written the standalone Red Tide: A Novel of the Next Pacific War and, in 2026, launched a new collaborative series, The Fourth Option, co-written with fellow thriller author Jack Carr. New readers can start with The Handler for his own original creation, or with Shadow State if they want to meet his take on Jack Ryan's world first. He lives in Redmond, Washington, and continues to publish across all three of his current series.