Gayle Lynds

Gayle Lynds is an American author widely credited with helping bring women into the male-dominated espionage-thriller genre. A former newspaper reporter and defense-industry technical writer, she draws on that background for tradecraft-heavy plots involving intelligence agencies, sleeper agents, and international conspiracies. Her solo novels include Masquerade, Mosaic, and The Last Spymaster, and she is also known for co-writing entries in Robert Ludlum's Covert-One series alongside authors including Robert Ludlum himself and, later, Jamie Freveletti. Lynds co-founded International Thriller Writers, Inc. in 2004 with fellow author David Morrell, serving as its first copresident, and the organization has since grown into one of the genre's major professional bodies, running the annual ThrillerFest convention and the Thriller Awards. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. In this catalogue she appears as one of thirteen suspense novelists who each contributed a chapter to I'd Kill For That (2004), a relay novel written collaboratively to raise money for breast-cancer research, alongside authors such as Lisa Gardner, Kathy Reichs, and Anne Perry -- a format in which no single writer controls the whole story, each building on the chapter before.