The President is Missing

It took me three days, but I finished the 511 pages of The President is Missing by former President Bill Clinton and author James Patterson almost as quickly as the book itself plays out. This is the first book I’ve read by Patterson. I must say first of all, I’m not a big fan of the Patterson book-mill, however impressive it is to churn out novels like he has done. I like my reading to have some lasting meaning, message or something to gain from it. This book does not have that. It’s just a distraction, a sensational escape from reality with a few philosophical messages thrown in, my guess to assuage the former president, and then a wrap of the story. 

All that said, I stuck with the book. I started it on Friday night. I finished it at 0200 hours Monday. So whatever was on those pages, hooked me enough to sit there straight and read, read, read.

The Plot

I won’t give that away, suffice it to say that someone has contacted the president with code words they should not have. Code words only a small circle of people know, and because someone on the outside knows them, that means someone in his inner circle has committed treason and set the country on the brink of a catastrophic collapse from a cyber attack. The president is the only person who can save the country. And so he goes about doing trying to do that.

Reviews on Amazon

There are reviews on Amazon (the three star ones are the ones I tend to focus on since they’re the middle of the road) thought the book was too wordy, that the end speech by the president to the Congress was too inflated, blah, blah, blah. I thought those criticisms were a little too stern once I finally got to the parts that were most critical. In fact, I thought they were misplaced and not all that accurate.

This is not a book that’s going to win any literary awards. It’s not meant to. It’s meant to make Clinton some money, (It has backfired in bringing up the Monica Lewinsky stuff by including the mention of impeachment in it) and it is meant to be another book for Patterson to sit on top of the New York Times Bestseller List for a while. What I thought was funny in a way was that I bought my copy of the book from Barnes and Noble in mid-June and it still bears a “50 Percent Off” red sticker on it. So while it is selling, no one appears to be making the top dollar off it they’d hoped.

Conclusion 

The book is worth buying and worth reading. It validates the premise of my first novel draft I have written, The Privacy Patriots, which I need to revise.  In that book, the president and the NSA are ready to launch the world’s first quantum computer and China, Russia, Iran and North Korea (I call them CRINK) find out and launch an all out cyber attack on the US. Because when we do get the first quantum computer activated, it’s going to render all the passwords we all have today useless. So after reading The President is Missing, I see it is time to dust off that draft and get it ready for querying.

A quantum computer will take down computer security. What was wrong with The President is Missing is that Clinton and Patterson forget that the whole world and USA is not dependent on Microsoft computers so a virus with a .exe suffix wouldn’t affect Linux-based servers and machines like Macs, and even the host this website is kept on. There would be problems, but not all the world would be affected like they proposed. But the problems would be bad and we’re supposed to suspend reality in reading a book like that and of course, we should all be worried to some degree because at some point, some kind of cyber attack is likely to affect us. Numerous government officials in the US have long-said it’s not a matter of “If,” but a matter of “when,” and when that finally does happen, Lord knows it’s not going to be pretty….