A capital thrill

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/11/2021 (1780 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Terrorist bombs go off all over Europe, killing and maiming hundreds — could this be the prelude to an attack on the United States?

Could those terrorists finally have acquired nuclear weapons? Can anyone possibly stop them?

Someone, such as besieged and beleaguered secretary of state Ellen Adams?

You’ll have to read pretty much to the last of the 500-ish pages in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first political thriller to find out — no, wait, let’s capitalize Thriller, because she’s given us an absolute crackerjack of a ride that will leave the reader breathless.

Clinton is good, abetted by Canadian murder mystery icon Louise Penny, creator of the magnificent Armand Gamache police whodunits.

It’s the first month of Democratic President Doug Williams’ administration, he having defeated the incompetent, fascist, corrupt, slimeball demagogue incumbent Eric Dunn.

Williams has unexpectedly named Adams as his secretary of state and she unexpectedly accepted — she’d run a media empire that opposed Williams getting the nomination. Could he be getting her out of the media while deviously setting her up through his own manipulations for failure, humiliation and firing?

He’s a Democrat, he has a woman as vice president, other people in this book coincidentally bear a resemblance to people living or dead. Say it ain’t so, Joe.

But there’s no time to ponder motivation — right away we’re off in an uncertain countdown to doom.

The less you know about the plot, the better.

The terrorists are odious, and there are foreign governments that are even worse. Villainous beyond them all are the plotters within the U.S., who want to install Dunn back in the White House as a puppet dictator. Would they go so far as to murder Americans and consort with the enemy? Could there be (brace yourselves) one or more traitors in the White House?

It’s not a spoiler to divulge that Adams spends much of the book flying around the world meeting both openly and covertly with heads of state, trying to avert disaster. If you want to know what alleged “diplomacy” is like, who better than Clinton to tell us?

Adams’ constant travels to half a world away are like a series of episodes of 24 on too much caffeine. When does Adams sleep or go to the bathroom? How do you drive across a major city in three minutes? Never mind — go with it.

Did any reader know about the Five Eyes? Clinton tells us the major English-speaking countries — the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada — share intelligence regularly. Brightest among them is Canada’s foreign affairs minister, a Francophone woman.

While it’s hard to know how much Penny affected the plot, it’s clearly her writing style, especially the paragraphs that mix lengthy exposition with abrupt points. Short sentences. Really short sentences. Incomplete sentences.

Of course, Clinton’s husband Bill has written two political thrillers with prolific author James Patterson. In both, we meet a first-person action hero president, special forces in one, Navy SEAL in another. Suffice to say, Hillary Rodham Clinton writes in the third person, and not once does Adams don a Rambo bandana and confront the terrorists with automatic weapon locked and loaded.

Are H. Clinton and Penny superior to B. Clinton and Patterson?

Oh, please.

State of Terror is a stunning and exhilarating book. OK, so maybe Clinton is taking revenge here and there, or maybe Vladimir Putin really is that monstrous. If you’re going to pick up a book by Clinton, you’re probably predisposed to believe the worst of thinly disguised real-life despots.

Look up “page-turner” in the dictionary and you might just find a picture of Clinton and Penny holding up a copy of State of Terror. Don’t forget to breathe.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin fondly recalls discovering political thrillers by reading Seven Days in May in the early 60s — State of Terror is on that level.