The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

I have read my share of John Grishams and Tom Clancys, but I haven't read much by James Patterson (maybe one or two that I can't remember?). But since this book was going around having been marketed as being written by Bill Clinton, I was a sucker like everyone else and decided to listen to it. It is basically whatever you would expect--a political thriller with an assassin, a cyberterrorism threat, and all sorts of distrust on all sides. The title is misleading, I thought, because it makes you think the president will be, well, missing, but since he's narrating most of the story, the reader always knows where he is. I felt like there didn't seem to be much interesting knowledge that Bill Clinton shared about being president, though. And I wonder if he thinks that President John Duncan is a version of himself--someone trying to do the right thing for the country but who's stuck fighting politics. It seems telling that the book opens with President Duncan in a mock Senate hearing trying him for impeachment (but not for a sex scandal). There were also some kind of preachy parts about "why is our political system so broken? Stop being terrible people!" and a few things that felt like they were being thrown in just to show how current the authors are--a reference to Flint, Michigan, and the president telling the Russian Prime Minister "stay out of our elections." (I felt like that was super annoying.) And it seems like the people that the President is surrounded with are all the smartest, most talented, most tortured, most whatever of anyone ever. He literally goes to get his make-up done by "the most beautiful woman in the world" when he's going in disguise somewhere, who just "happened" to be his wife's college roommate at Harvard.

I was caught up in this story and enjoyed it for its thriller-like aspects, and I was caught off-guard by who the actual traitor was at the end of the story. So that part was great. The pregnant female assassin was pretty fierce too. But there were a lot of holes and I was a little creeped out by the kind-of similarities to Bill Clinton and wondering if that's what he really thinks he was as the President.