NOTEWORTHY DEATH

Best-selling author of thriller novels

Vince Flynn, a best-selling author of thriller novels set in a world of canny terrorists, inept politicians and freedom-loving counterterrorist assassins, died Wednesday in St. Paul, Minn. He was 47.

The cause was prostate cancer, said a spokesman for his literary agency, ICM Partners.

Flynn wrote 14 books, with a total of 15 million copies sold in the United States. All but the first book featured his protagonist Mitch Rapp, the sometimes freelance, sometimes CIA-employed killer whose vigilante instincts were ignited by the death of his high school sweetheart, Maureen. (The story line puts her on Pan Am Flight 103, which was destroyed over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 by a terrorist bomb.)

The Mitch Rapp character was born in 1999’s Transfer of Power. Flynn wrote about a novel a year from then on. All of them made The New York Times’ best-seller list. The last six, including his final novel, The Last Man, reached No. 1.

Flynn spoke of his books’ popularity in an interview last year with FrontPage magazine, an online journal. “In my series,” he said, “the heroes are the men and women of the Secret Service, the CIA, Special Forces, the whole national security apparatus. And the villains are, shockingly enough, Islamic radical fundamentalists.” He added: “The secondary villains that I have are politicians and bureaucrats. It’s very easy to build a story around that, because it’s reality.”