Austin-based novelist Karen Olsson’s background as a journalist (as writer-at-large for Texas Monthly and an editor of the late Texas Observer ) has enriched her fiction since the beginning of her career.

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Waterloo , her first novel, offers a sophisticated, perspective on the political scene in a state capital not unlike Austin. Her sharply observed characters are bigger-than-lifelike, at once realistic and comical. There’s political reporter Nick Lasseter, who “avoided designated press areas, media sign-in tables, question-and-answer periods. He’d never been keen on joining that particular club, and as a writer for a barely respectable publication, he wasn’t quite the club’s cup of tea either.” And Beverly Flintic, a newly elected conservative state assemblywoman, who muses, “After the better part of a year in office, the protocols of the place still eluded her; the longer she was here the more coded everything seemed.…