Boyd Morrison

Boyd Morrison took a mechanical engineering degree at Rice and joined Lockheed on NASA's Space Station Freedom project at the Johnson Space Center, where he flew aboard the KC-135 aircraft used to train astronauts for weightlessness. A doctorate in industrial engineering from Virginia Tech carried him to Thomson/RCA, where his work produced sixteen US patents, and then to Microsoft's Xbox division as a usability manager, with credits on Project Gotham Racing 2, Flight Simulator 2004 and Forza Motorsport. He won on Jeopardy! in 2003 and has acted on stage in Noises Off and Twelve Angry Men. His first novel, self-published before Simon and Schuster took it on, introduced the army engineer Tyler Locke and was translated into twenty-two languages. The Midas Code, issued in America as The Vault, is the second Locke book: a bomb threat on a Washington State ferry opens onto an ancient Greek puzzle and the lost gold of King Midas. The Roswell Conspiracy followed in 2012. Morrison went on to write six Oregon Files adventures with Clive Cussler, and a medieval series beginning with The Lawless Land alongside his sister Beth Morrison, a manuscripts curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum.