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Bestselling author Vince Flynn, who wrote the Mitch Rapp counter-terrorism thriller series and sold more than 15 million books in the US alone, died yesterday after a more than two-year battle with prostate cancer, said friends and his publisher. He was 47.

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 local bestseller, Pocket Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, signed him to a two-book deal and Term Limits became a New York Times bestseller in paperback.

He also sold millions of books in the international market and averaged about a book a year, most of them focused on Rapp, a CIA counter-terrorism operative. His 14th novel, The Last Man, was published last year.

Flynn died at a hospital in St Paul, Minneapolis surrounded by about 35 relatives and friends who prayed the Rosary, said longtime family friend Kathy Schneeman. She said his deep Catholic faith was an important part of his character.

Flynn was born 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 as an account and sales marketing specialist with Kraft General Foods. That marketing background later came in handy as he promoted Term Limits.

Wanting a new challenge, he quit Kraft in 1990 when he landed an aviation candidate slot with the Marine Corps, but he was later disqualified due to seizures he suffered following a childhood car accident. Thwarted from becoming a military aviator, he got the idea of writing thrillers.

“If (Tom) Clancy could do it, why can’t I?” Flynn said in a 2005 interview with The Associated Press.

He went to work for the Twin Cities based commercial real estate company United Properties 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 moved to Colorado. He began working on what became Term Limits, a story about assassins who targeted fat-cat congressmen.

Flynn was diagnosed with stage three metastatic prostate cancer in November 2010. The fatigue from his radiation treatments eventually made it difficult to focus on writing for more than an hour or two, and in October 2011, he reluctantly postponed publication for several months of his 13th book, Kill Shot, which followed Rapp’s adventures as he pursued those responsible for the bombing of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

Flynn is survived by his wife, Lysa Flynn, and three children.