I’ve had a streak of mediocre books lately, and this one didn’t snap it. I got the impression this wasn’t the first book starring Senator Lee, but I’m probably not going to seek the others out. As with a lot of political novels, it is populated by caricatures—Lee is the brilliant Democrat running for President, Efton is the dense opponent, Wallace is the evil Republican senator propping up Efton, and Tennant is the backwoods paramilitary nut. The Secret Service is portrayed as nearly incompetent (apparently after two near miss assassination attempts they still didn’t have any surveillance on the roof of the building where a major presidential debate was occurring), the sitting President has a stroke and dies, and the VP secretly has Alzheimers. An inmate of a federal penitentiary has a better intelligence network than the mass-media and is able to use his knowledge to blackmail members of Congress. I’m sure there are even more clichés, but from all that you can pretty much guess the plot of this novel. And you’d be right.
United States Senator William Henry Lee IV and his wife, Katharine Rule Lee, drove away from their Georgetown house in their Chevrolet Suburban early on a December morning.
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