Absurd thriller features one of the most preposterous killers committed to print
“What the hell is going on, people?” yells US president Jonathan Lincoln Duncan for the 512th time (on almost every page) as he urgently tries to stop an annihilating cyberattack on America. The commander-in-chief dreamed up by former US president Bill Clinton (below ) and James Patterson, the world’s bestselling author, is “50 years old and rusty”, “a war hero with rugged good looks and a sharp sense of humour”. The “hell” that is going on for the reader is a perfectly absurd and terrifically boring actioner in which Duncan frantically attempts to thwart a “devastating stealth wiper virus”.
The nefarious plot to “reboot the world” has been cooked up by Suliman Cindoruk, “the most dangerous and prolific cyberterrorist in the world”. He’s “Turkish-born”, but “not Muslim” and yet, nonetheless, confusingly leads an organisation known as the Sons of Jihad.
Duncan is facing possible im- peachment for allegedly having a telephone conversation with Cindoruk and striking some kind of deal after letting him escape during a special forces attack. Did he? And why? A House select committee wants to know.
All becomes tediously clear soon enough. Duncan is a stoic boy scout. A former governor of North Carolina, he served and was wounded in Iraq. He’s also a widower with a daughter and suffers from immune thrombocytopenia, a debilitating blood disorder. Choosing to carry the burden of the ghastly truth about Cindoruk’s conspiracy — codenamed “Dark Ages” — on his own, Duncan decides to sneak out of the White House in disguise to tackle the threat.
This central concept — “I haven’t opened my own car door for a decade,” says Duncan, stepping into the real world — is a potentially interesting one. Having him narrate most of the book from his point of view is also promising.
But he doesn’t go missing, not really, and what unfolds is fantastically silly — the elderly authors resort to monkey emojis at one point to flag their nowness — and unintentionally comedic.
The whole fatuous and bizarrely written shebang almost seems to have been constructed as the foundation for a long-winded and desperately earnest sermon clearly voiced by Clinton at the end of the book.
It’s a pity that he couldn’t have spent more time making his insider knowledge more compelling. But that’s what’s happening here, people.