Former President of the United States, Bill Clinton, has teamed up for the second time with author James Patterson. Their first collaboration, a political thriller, sold more than three million copies. The second novel, titled The President’s Daughter is a sequel to the first and will draw on Mr. Clinton’s time in and out of the White House.
Their latest collaboration is “The President’s Daughter”, a brisk and engaging read despite being longer than 600 pages, it tells the story of a former president whose daughter is kidnapped, forcing him to navigate a delicate political environment while using skills from his own military past. The book was published on 7th June 2021 by the American publishing houses, Little, Brown, and Penguin Random House imprint, the Knopf.
Patterson is not someone normally associated with politics. His most famous books, which have sold more than 300 million copies, include crime and mystery thrillers like the “Alex Cross” series and the “Women’s Murder Club” series, as well as his many standalone books that span multiple genres. He is the author who has launched a thousand bestsellers, with an army of co-writers.
Clinton is the ex-president whose other works include the memoir “My Life.” (At 1,056 pages, it is nearly 500 pages longer than this still-hefty new thriller.) Their first co-written novel, “The President Is Missing,” envisioned a scenario in which the American president, facing a deadly cyberterrorist attack that threatens to disconnect the entire United States from the internet, slips incognito into a baseball stadium and tries to solve the problem by himself.
Strangely, given Clinton’s input, there is precious little politics in the book – and what there is never really rises above the cliché of the Washington insider playing political games with life or death decisions in the White House.
Some might question this collaboration and few would say Patterson has only taken on the former President to boost his sales, but given he can happily shift millions of books on his own there is no doubt that Patterson does not need Clinton.
