It may not be great literature, but it’s bound to sell a bundle.
The President Is Missing is a can’tmiss zinger of a title for a summer thriller.
And the names on the, er, masthead are grabbers, too: Bill Clinton and James Patterson.
So what kind of concoction have the former president and the best-selling novelist dreamed up? An overheated, logic-defying, overlong thriller about cyber terrorism that thrives on breathless Homeland- style pyrotechnics — brought to an occasional screeching halt by policy-wonk digressions. (The book even ends with a nine-page address to Congress!)
OK, so The President Is Missing (Little, Brown/Knopf, 513 pp., ★★g☆) isn’t going to win the Pulitzer Prize. But let’s not discount the curiosity factor sure to entice millions of readers.
The novel is fascinating in its own weird way, and patient thriller fans who like their assassins creepily sexy (yes, there’s a female assassin), their plots thick with duplicity and their time-ticking countdown stakes high are likely to find this a diverting-enough beach read.
But first, that president. Not William Jefferson Clinton, but Jonathan Lincoln Duncan.
Despite the cadences in their names, these two have little in common, unless Bill Clinton was running around Washington back in the ’ 90s having clandestine meetings at ballparks with terrorists, firing Glocks and saving America from complete destruction, and we never heard about it.
Part John McCain, part Barack Obama (Donald Trump, not even a sliver), President Duncan is an Iraq War vet/ POW (and former governor of a Southern state) who’s not just a hero, but a superhero. (Did we mention he has a debilitating blood disorder?) The guy can do no wrong, except for that temper. But he has reason to be angry. The Speaker of the House wants to impeach him for no good reason!
No, not because this valiant widower (his wife died of cancer) had an affair with an intern, but because he put in a phone call to the world’s most
wanted terrorist, the for-hire Suliman Cindoruk.
That’s the launching pad for Patterson and Clinton’s plot, which spans five action-packed days. The book is narrated by our president-hero, an I’m-going-take-things-into-my-own-hands kind of guy.
That means slipping the Secret Service to meet two young cyber terrorists at Nationals Park who are having second thoughts about a virus they’ve planted for Cindoruk that will shut down every operating system in America once it’s activated. (Who’s behind the attack that would send us back to the “Dark Ages”? Russia? China? North Korea? A Muslim nation?)
More urgently, can the president stop it in time? Do you doubt it?
Aside from the dizzying cyber scheme, The President Is Missing has a subplot that kept me guessing. There’s a traitor in the White House, but is it the vice president who thinks she should have been president, or someone else? (There are lots of women at top levels of government in Missing. Hello, Hillary!) Another female character, the chilling assassin who goes by Bach, is also a darkly entertaining thriller trope.
Does The President Is Missing dabble in message-delivery? For sure. We’re a divided nation that needs to come together and ensure the rights of immigrants, women, the disabled and the LGBTQ community while we’re at it. (See that speech to Congress on page 500.)
President Duncan for a second term! Or at least a Showtime series, and yes, an adaptation is in the works. Cue Hail to the Super-Chief!