PHOTO: Kate Jones

Walker, who gave up skating that same year, has plowed much of that adolescent raw material into her latest novel, Blade (Thomas & Mercer), released in January. The psychological thriller follows attorney Ana Robbins as she returns to the skating facility where she trained as a teenager. She’s there to defend Grace, a current student, who has been accused of murdering her assistant coach, who once trained Ana. While try-
ing to solve the murder much is revealed about her own skating career, endangering both Ana and Grace.

Minus the murder, Blade echoes Walker’s three years of training in Colorado Springs. Like Ana, at 13 she became an “orphan”—a skater who boarded at the facility, far from parents. “I moved away because my mother’s schedule became really grueling between raising my two-year-old sibling and driving me everywhere to train,” she recalled.

Her hometown coach believed she had what it took to make the Olympics, but after three years of training, Walker had become lonely and disillusioned with the sport. She left skating and embraced academia. “I got into Brown and thought, you know, going to an Ivy League college is my Olympics,” she said.

COURTESY WENDY WALKER

After graduating with degrees in economics and political science, she worked at Goldman Sachs, then earned a law degree from Georgetown University, and worked as a family attorney. When she became a mother, she wanted to work from home. “This was before the internet, so I didn’t have a lot of choices. I really liked reading John Grisham novels, so I thought, why couldn’t I write a legal thriller?” Armed with the discipline she had developed on the ice and what she had learned in a Brown creative writing class, she embarked on a career as a writer.

Blade, Walker’s 10th novel, follows her 2016 publishing debut and national bestseller, All is Not Forgotten, and last year’s Mad Love, a psychological thriller audiobook. Her books have been optioned for the screen and translated into 23 languages. She credits Brown with surrounding her with artistic people who inspired her to embrace her own creativity.

Walker lives in Connecticut, where she strives to write a chapter a day while creating video content for her growing presence on TikTok. She returned to the ice last summer for the first time in 15 years. “At first, my whole body forgot how to do it,” she said. “But slowly, the brain-body connection started to work.”