Noah Boyd was the pseudonym Paul Lindsay, of a former FBI agent who spent more than twenty years working on some of the Bureau's toughest investigations, including the Green River Killer case and the Highland Park Strangler case (which he's credited with solving).The first book in his Steve Vail series, The Bricklayer, was published in 2010. The second, Agent X, was published in February 2011. Boyd's intimate knowledge of the Bureau's inner workings, including its weaknesses, and his "in the trenches" experience lent unusual authenticity to Vail's character and the novel’s investigative details. Boyd died in 2011, at the age of 68.