About the Author: Brendan Carroll

By-Line: Only a Fool can rule the world.

Brendan Carroll spent his first fourteen years running free through the deep woods of the East Texas Pine Forests. During the early part of his life, he had the great fortune to live next door to his grandparents on a small family subsistence farm where he learned about nature, farming and story-telling from his grandfather. Throughout his childhood and early schooling, his first love was reading and after he learned to write, he found a new love… writing. Growing up in the late fifties and sixties, he watched the rock and roll and sexual revolution unfold all around him with a sense of something profoundly precious being thrown down by the onslaught of progress and plastic.

After high school, Brendan joined the Navy to see the world; unfortunately, the world he saw was confined to the Southeastern United States and his short but interesting military career carried him no further than Georgia, Tennessee and Florida. But his limitless curiosity about everything and anything took him straight from the Navy into college where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in teaching, graduating with honors, hoping to make a secure place for himself in Middle Class America. This dream did not play out as expected when he found himself employed as a Middle School Science teacher in a very small Texas town. Of his 140 or so students, he found only three actually interested in learning anything other than how to annoy each other, the faculty and still play football on Friday night in spite of failing grades. The former, they excelled in and the latter, they accomplished by convincing their parents that their failing grade was a completely the fault of the teacher.

After one year of teaching, Brendan changed careers from teacher to Correctional Officer for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice where he knew he would be safe from irate parents.

Eventually, he worked his way up to an administrative position with the State of Texas and spent twenty-three years serving as a public servant. In early 2010, he retired and took up writing full-time.

Brendan Carroll has been an avid reader and student of such subjects as mythology, quantum physics, environmental science, geology, archaeology, paleontology and astronomy. He has taken courses in astrology, numerology and other arcane subjects including alchemy, tarot and dream interpretation. His interests have taken him from the sterile labs of absolute science to the dusty attics of conspiracy theorists.

Always seeking to learn more and more, his varying interests and curiosity took him on a odyssey through religion as well. As a young boy, he attended a Pentecostal church. From there, he became a Baptist. Dissatisfied with those two, he studied with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons and eventually took catechism classes, intending to convert to Catholicism. When the conversion failed to take, Carroll had to look elsewhere. Naturally, Catholicism, or rather, the history of Catholicism drew his attention next and he began to study the religions of those persecuted and pushed into oblivion by the Church of Rome: the Cathars, the Egyptian Coptic Christians and the practitioners of the so-called Black Arts.

Eventually, Brendan discovered the amazing history of the Crusades and, in particular, the mythos and legends surrounding the Knights Templar. After devouring every documentary and book available on the subject of the poor Knights.

Brendan Carroll currently has twenty-nine books published through non-traditional channels at Amazon.com for Kindle, Smashwords.com for various other eReaders and through Amazon’s print on demand paperback program.
The Assassin Chronicles series is drawing to a close with twenty-six of the thirty projected novels published. The series falls into the epic fantasy genre and details the adventures of the members of the Order of the Red Cross of Gold, poor Knights of Solomon’s Temp