The President Is Missing: A Novel

The promise of this book is a well-crafted thriller with a compelling mystery, with the pedigree of probably the best-selling author of the genre (James Patterson), injected with insights and details about politics and the US government from an actual former president (Bill Clinton). And it more or less delivers on that. It's just a pretty standard example of the genre. The story is complex but internally consistent, so that as you read you feel like you can unravel the mystery along with the fictional President Duncan (the main character), and it keeps the action going all the way to the end. I enjoyed this book and I think it's a good read if you like these kinds of stories, but it's not going on my list of favorites.

I guess my main "complaint", if one can call it that, is that the plot is extremely compressed and pretty intense all the way through... which is completely typical of this genre of writing, to be fair, but more realistically I would expect events like the ones in the book to develop over a longer time. Having some downtime for the characters to dwell on the uncertainty without being able to do anything about it would enhance the story, in my opinion. The other thing is that some of the technical aspects of the plot don't quite make sense. I'm not sure if that only sticks out to me because I work in software; perhaps it won't be a concern for most readers, but for me it made the climactic scenes hard to take seriously.

SPOILER ALERTS

I'm a sucker for anything set in DC, and yet...
- Apparently I've read too many non-fiction books about the coming meltdown of our cyber systems, because nothing in here was jaw-dropping.
- I accurately guessed the traitor early enough that I was banging my head against a wall through many of the interactions.
- It's still not clear why he had to go to such lengths to ditch security - especially since it turns out he actually hadn't.
- Don't introduce a blood disease if it's not going to serve the plot in some way - feels like you forgot to use one of the threads you'd pulled out to knit with.
- This feels like a thinly veiled parable for our current crazy times. I agree with the message, but the speech in the epilogue is not unlike Ayn Rand pushing Objectivism in its transparency.

...apparently I'm not.