Thurs. March 4

Paul Lindsay is Noah Boyd and Noah Boyd is Paul Lindsay. Lindsay wrote six novels for Simon & Schuster, but, as Boyd, he just published the thriller “The Bricklayer,” and he’s got a hit on his hands – No. 22 on the New York Times best-seller list. He’s reading at Bookends in Winchester Thursday March 4 at 7.
   The backstory: It was 1986. FBI agent-profiler Paul Lindsay had returned to his home in Detroit, after working three months on the infamous Green River serial killer case in Seattle. 
   He found himself bored, sitting on the couch, watching “The Smurfs” with his two kids.
   “My brain was rotting,” he said, by phone from his home in Rye, NH. “I had no other cultural interests.” So, he decided to take an adult education course. Math was his first choice, but there wasn’t anything suitable. They suggested creative writing. He was hesitant, having failed English in college. But he went for it.
     “The teacher asked us to write a three-page short story,” Linsday recalled. “So I wrote this thing and she said, ‘With your background, life experience and the way you write, you can do this professionally.’”
    That led to a first novel, 1992’s “Witness to the Truth,” that got him in hot water with the FBI – he was cited for insubordination. Lindsay believed the FBI felt he revealed too much inside information.     Then, in 1993 Lindsay was featured in a Vanity Fair story where he called then-FBI director William Sessions a very bad name. Another insubordination charge.
    Ironically, this came as Lindsay was being commended by the FBI for solving the Highland Park serial killings in Detroit. (Benjamin Atkins was convicted for 11 murders during a nine-month spree.)
    Lindsay – a Marine who fought in the Vietnam War for over a year - had been planning on retiring anyway. But now he knew it was time to go.
    “My first 15 years in the FBI were a dream,” Lindsay said. “If I’d had the money, I’d have paid them to let me do it. But the last five years –ever since I came back from the Green River murders- it started getting really bad. There were so many career-building managers who’d never worked a case and ended up becoming bosses.”
     Lindsay’s new career was on the rise – movie producer Jerry Bruckheimer bought the rights to “Witness to the Truth” (though it never was made)– and he wrote five more novels for Simon and Schuster. 
     This month, the 66-year-old author came out the taut thriller “The Bricklayer.” It features an ex-FBI agent and loner-renegade named Steve Vail. And he became Noah Boyd.
     “My writing has taken a new direction,” Lindsay said, “so they wanted a fresh start with a new name. It’s a three-book deal and the only stipulation is it be the same two male-female characters.”
     “The Bricklayer” has earned praise from best-selling crime novelists Patricia Cornwell, Lee Child and James Patterson.  Although the book features new characters – a hard-bitten loner in Vail and his companion, FBI agent Kate Bannon - Lindsay said it’s consistent with his other work.
     “I divide the FBI into two groups,” he said, “street agents who go out and take chances and get the work done and the managers who are mainly concerned with being promoted and retiring at a higher salary. It’s the theme of all the books. I always try to make the street agents look like good guys and the managers look like the idiots they are. I’ve sent in a few books where the editors have said ‘You make these guys look so dumb,’ and I’ve said ‘You don’t know how much I smartened ‘em up.’”
    In “The Bricklayer,” there is a complicated, cunning extortion plot targeting the FBI, possibly by a small terrorist group. The plot takes numerous unexpected twists, with the FBI trying to both investigate and keep it quiet – as agents get killed. The final reveal is a wallop.
    Vail displays amazing strength, stamina and smarts. Is he an idealized version of Lindsay?
   “To a certain degree,” he said, “or maybe the guy I’d like to have been.”
   It’s not, he admitted, an entirely plausible story line. “I don’t think it could happen to the degree it does happen,” Lindsay said. “You have to hyperbolize everything to sell it.”
   In the almost-too-ironic-to-be-true department, Lindsay said his publisher told him the bookstore at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia wanted him to do a reading.
    “Obviously,” Lindsay said, “they haven’t read the book. But I’m supposed to go down next month. It’s gonna be fun.”

(This is an expanded version of a story that ran in the Boston

Herald, www.bostonherald.com earlier in the week.)

Bookends Bookstore, 559 Main St., Winchester, 781-721-5933. www.bookendswinchester.com