I'll start with the positives. It was a fast read. The story has the potential to be interesting. I also found a really interesting bookmark in it left by the previous owner.
That's that bit over and done with.
The back cover proclaims this to be the most authentic political thriller I'll ever read. I'm sorry but if Dr Seuss wrote one it would feel more genuine than this. The last Carl Hiaasen felt a lot more realistic than this - and it was well written - which gives it a huge advantage over this farrago of a novel.
This is by far the worst written book I've read in years. The prose can charitably be described as clunky. if I wasn't feeling charitable, I'd go for frenetic, irritating and just plain bad.
The writers seem to think that action sequences are best done with ever shorter sequences featuring different characters finishing by cutting away from what the final character sees without telling the reader what that was.
At some point in the next chapter, one of the other characters will talk about what happened.
The lead character Ellen is the newly appointed secretary of State for the USA, appointed despite being a huge political rival to the newly incumbent president. We might as well call her Mary Sue as she is the most obvious self insert by Mrs Clinton. She's almost impossibly astute, fluent in a dozen languages, and utterly flawless in personality. Despite her perfection and intelligence though, she fails to recognise the villain of the piece when he's stood right next to her and talking to her, even though she once spent two years making a documentary about him...
That's just one plot hole out of many in this badly edited, badly written attempt at literature. When I say badly edited, you can't give a better example than when we get this direct quote from the book (Pages 360 &361 in my copy)
"The second wave took off, the helicopters filled with precious cargo. The sons and daughters of parents who would be terrified to know what their country was asking of their children. The young men and women clutched M-14 rifles and stared across the aisle at each other.
The young men and women clutched M-14 rifles and stared across the aisle at each other."
Apart from the repetition of an entire sentence, this section shows just one of the thousands of sentence fragments to be found in the book.
Constant use of incomplete sentences for no reason.
Sentences without verbs. Scattered all through the book. At least 5 to a page. In action sequences, probably twenty per page. And no payout at the end of it. Because of cutaways.
It becomes very wearing, very quickly. There are several deaths in the book. But all off screen with a cutaway immediately before it happens.
If it was better written I could forgive some of the flaws. If it hadn't promised "the most authentic - and gripping - political thriller I've ever read" on the back cover, I might be willing to accept the scene where she blackmails the Russian leader by photoshopping him into child porn and threatening to release it to the world unless he tells her where the bad guy is hiding, or where she follows the US version of the SAS on a raid into the villain's house, or where she seems to be able to travel halfway around the world in a couple of hours, or any of the other places where it's slightly less realistic than the Tiger who Came to Tea.
But it isn't.
This is a dreadful book on nearly every level. It's the closest I've come in a long time to not finishing. The only reason I did was because it's this month's book group read. I forced myself to finish it, and I'm sorry that I did.
The last two pages are the most cliched pile of nonsense in the book. It's all over, the threats gone... Or is it? Mwa ha ha ha ha.
Don't waste your time with this book. My copy will be going to mulch down somewhere for compost. I don't see any justification for inflicting this on anyone else. I have no one I hate that much.
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