Vince Flynn, 47, a best-selling author who wrote the Mitch Rapp counterterrorism thriller series, died Wednesday at a hospital in St. Paul, Minn., after a more than two-year battle with prostate cancer, according to friends and his publisher.

Flynn was supporting himself by bartending when he self-published his first novel, “Term Limits,” in 1997 after getting more than 60 rejection letters. After it became a Twin Cities best-seller, Pocket Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, signed him to a two-book deal — and “Term Limits” became a New York Times best-seller in paperback.

The St. Paul-based author averaged about a book a year, most of them focused on Rapp, a CIA counterterrorism operative. His 14th novel, “The Last Man,” was published last year. He counted former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton among his fans, as well as foreign leaders and intelligence community figures.

Flynn was born April 6, 1966, to an Irish Catholic family in St. Paul, the fifth of seven children. After graduating with an economics degree from the University of St. Thomas in 1988, he went to work in marketing for Kraft General Foods.


He landed an aviation candidate slot with the Marine Corps in 1990 but was later disqualified due to seizures he suffered following a childhood car accident.

He then joined a commercial real estate company and started working on a book idea in his spare time. Two years later, he quit so he could devote more time to writing and focused on what became “Term Limits,” a story about assassins who targeted fat-cat congressmen.

A man of almost superhero powers, Mitch Rapp races the clock to foil terrorists’ plans to detonate a nuclear warhead in Washington in “Memorial Day” (2004), battles terrorists who seize the White House and take hostages in “Transfer of Power” (1999) and is out for vengeance after a Saudi billionaire puts a bounty on his head in “Consent to Kill” (2005).

Development for a Mitch Rapp movie based on 2010’s “American Assassin” remains on track, said a spokesman for CBS Films.


—Times staff and wire reports

news.obits@latimes.com