Brandon Keller

Brandon Keller writes thrillers about power, technology, and consequence — and he writes them from inside the world they describe.

A Tallahassee native, Keller has spent three decades in insurance and financial risk, working first as an actuary and now as President and CEO of Germania Insurance in Brenham, Texas. That career has been a long study in the subject his novels keep circling: how consequential decisions actually get made, who is in the room when they are, and what those decisions cost the people who make them. The boardrooms, balance sheets, and negotiating tables in his fiction have the texture of places that exist because they are.

His writing began in 2017, when his wife encouraged him to spend a weekend at a workshop. Hundreds of thousands of keystrokes later, that detour produced The Game, his debut novel, published by Black Rose Writing in July 2025. It won Popular Fiction at the 2026 IndieReader Discovery Awards and was a General Fiction finalist at the 2024 Maxy Awards. Beyond Control, the second novel in the Tyler Rush series, arrives December 10, 2026.

Keller is a longtime poker player, though not for the reason readers of The Game might assume. He is interested in poker as a framework rather than a sport — a way of thinking about strategy, pressure, and decisions made with incomplete information, which is also a fair description of running a company. He writes about artificial intelligence in the same spirit: not as a villain, but as a force that reshapes human judgment and tests the systems built to contain it.

Around his family he is known for being a little goofy and not taking himself too seriously. He is an animal lover, particularly dogs and cats, and plays chess on his phone with considerably more enthusiasm than talent. He and his family travel whenever they can, from the rolling hills of Hobbiton in New Zealand to the beaches of Amelia Island, Florida, which has become their favorite home away from home.

He lives in Brenham, Texas with his wife, Jill, and their family, where he is usually working on the next novel or wondering what would happen if today’s emerging technologies became tomorrow’s greatest source of power.