Wednesday night, I finished reading The President’s Daughter (warning: spoilers ahead).
The plot is easy to summarize. Melanie, the 19-year-old daughter of ex-POTUS Matt Keating, is kidnapped by Islamic terrorists. After seeing the rescue efforts flop, Matt (who is also a former Navy SEAL) is motivated to use his political connections to recruit his own rescue team and head to Libya to save his girl. Meanwhile, the Chinese government sends its own agent Jiang to try to negotiate with the Islamic terrorists in the hope that returning Melanie safely could improve souring US-China relations.
I’ll admit that the concept is kind of silly, but it worked. The book can be best described as a fast-paced page turner. Many of the characters were crafty and wily. As a result, the short chapters were filled with plot twist after plot twist. (I did predict quite a few of them, but some of them got me.) As a side note, I found it interesting how they made you feel somewhat sorry for Chinese Agent Jiang near the end; in the beginning he’s set up to be a completely unlikeable villain.
Before going in, I didn’t know that this was the second collaboration between Bill Clinton and James Patterson. That fact is a little embarrassing for an avid reader like me, considering that The President is Missing was the most popular book of 2018. Anyhow, the missing knowledge piqued my curiosity. Wondering what kind of campy action thriller a former US president would allow his name to get attached to is part of the reason why I was so motivated to read.
