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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.