HarperCollins To Kill the President, Fiction, Paperback, Sam Bourne
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Price: £10.99
Brand: HarperCollins
Description: Maggie Costello uncovers an assassination plot to kill the tyrannical new president. A blockbuster thriller from No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author Sam Bourne. HarperCollins To Kill the President, Fiction, Paperback, Sam Bourne - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: Harper Collins
Product ID: 9780007413720
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Dimensions: 129x198mm
Keywords: Fire and Fury Michael Wolff,Fire and Fury
ISBN: 9780007413720
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Author: Ralph Blumenau
Rating: 5
Review: The President is never named, but there is no doubt he is, in every respect, President Trump, for whom Sam Bourne (the pen name of the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland) has an undisguised hatred. Trump had become President in January 2017; Bourne’s book was published just six months later. The episodes in the story are never exactly dated, but the President had very recently been elected, and already he is ready to launch a nuclear strike against Korea – and, for good measure, on China, too – because the young North Korean president has issued a statement describing the American as “a paper tiger, a coward and a small man”. The strike is averted, with ten seconds to spare. Only a tiny number of people know that the world had only just escaped a nuclear war. Among them is Robert Kassian, the nominal Chief of Staff, the “responsible adult in the room”, who now sees it as his duty to neutralize the President, even to the extent of working with the Chinese ambassador in Washington. Another is General Jim Bruton, the appalled Secretary of Defense. The two men examine various methods of removing the President: a medical declaration that he was unfit to hold office, or an impeachment; but none of these would work, and they came to the conclusion that the only option was to have the President killed. The President had whipped up hatred of the Latinos. One of these had been a fellow-soldier of Bruton’s. He was an outstanding marksman and was absolutely devoted to Bruton, and Bruton recruits him to do the deed. He in turn recruits another Latino who has only weeks to live in any case, and who is prepared to play a part and give his life in the attempt. Others who felt alarmed by the President included Maggie Costello, who had worked for the previous administration and was now working in the White House office of Crawford McNamara (Steve Bannon?), the obnoxious Counsel to the new President. She is quite a detective and works out that an apparent suicide of someone working for the President was in fact a murder, though her intuition as to who could have killed him is wrong. She also finds out how close the world had come to Mutually Assured Destruction. Her intuition also told her that there was a plot to kill the President. But, much as she hated the President, she dreaded what his assassination would do to the already deeply divided United States and thought she ought to stop the assassination. (This quixotic trait of “doing the right thing” had, once before, made her do something that had actually contributed to the President’s victory in the presidential election of 2016. That’s one of her weaknesses. Another is that, unsuspectingly, she had for some time been sleeping with an enemy. It’s a devastating blow to her when she discovers his betrayal.) As she now begins to probe, she runs into life-threatening danger. (The first instance of this involves some enemy of hers using some very high tech methods – an extreme example of Bourne’s fascination with computer technologies; but this one strikes me as quite unbelievable.) Someone has invalidated her pass to the White House. Her sister and two young children are also at the receiving end of a hi-tech attempt on their lives. She even discovers the occasion and time when the President was about to be assassinated. Obviously I must not reveal what happened next, in the last quarter of the book. Among the chapters set in America are interspersed four chapters, several days before the events in and around the White House had started, and set respectively in Iceland, in India, in England and in Namibia. In each of them, an unsuspecting man is murdered for no reason given and with apparently no connection with the story in America. Well, clever Maggie also works out how these are connected and how the President and McNamara were involved. Not that it helps her. The lesson we take away from the novel is that “liberals” like Maggie, Kassian and Bruton don’t stand a chance against the new Administration’s ruthlessness and manipulation of public opinion. That is why I think that the last four pages, which suggest that perhaps all was not lost, strike me as a cop-out and as both open-ended and quite unconvincing. The book is ingeniously plotted, mostly a real page-turner, and just occasionally over-egging the pudding.
Author: stoker
Rating: 4
Review: In the Trump era this is frighteningly plausible and might easily have happened. Good read if you like a thriller and are concerned about the abuse of power
