Review

Three years ago, in TRE's September 2018 issue, I reviewed the first collaboration between these two, The President is Missing. I noted that despite preachifying about democratic unity at the end of the book and some obvious tropes and less than elegant writing by Patterson, their thriller vastly succeeded. The pair of authors have again created a page-turner focusing on a former president, his daughter, and a diabolical terrorist. While the new book clocks in at 594 pages, there is a lot of uninked space due to short chapters, and a captivated reader can churn through the novel's fast paces in a matter of hours. As in the first book, this former president - Matt Keating - was a war hero and remains capable of physical action, though hobbled a bit by age. He has lost the presidency to his former vice-president Pamela Barnes, who along with her husband (also her chief of staff) is ambitiously devoid of morals. Keating is living on a remote New Hampshire lake guarded of course by secret service agents. His wife feels liberated from politics and has returned to academia in Boston, and their relationship remains strong, but like the first book is sexless, so is this since no way is Bill Clinton going near love scenes with his past. The former president's daughter, Mel Keating, is a Dartmouth student who as an adult at 19 elects to forgo secret service protection. While hiking with a boyfriend in the White Mountains, she is kidnapped and the boyfriend is murdered by a terrorist named Asim Al-Asheed, who with help of a stereotypical Chinese spy seeking political favors in the Middle East, spirits her to a compound in Libya. The motive is classic revenge. When Keating was president a U.S. drone strike had obliterated Al-Asheed's wife and daughters. Following a faked execution of Mel Keating meant to stab at her father's soul, the former president and Navy SEAL fights the Washington bureaucracy to launch his own Rambo-style Libyan rescue effort. President Barnes does not want Keating to succeed since she would be politically humiliated, and some nasty political blackmail is needed to get the White House to stand down. Mel Keating makes an heroic and failed effort to escape and is slated to be killed this time for real. Reunited ex-SEALs and renegade secret service operatives work against the clock to help Keating's clandestine mission, and there is Tom Clancy-like military maneuvering in C-135 aircraft and Blackhawk choppers to boot. Israeli and Saudi former intelligence officials from Keating's past pitch in, and the duplicitous Chinese spy who had helped the terrorist is now forced by Beijing to mount China's own mercenary effort to find Mel Keating first and save the Middle Kingdom's face. What happens next on the Libyan sands is, true to form, a thriller's ending.

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