Huge apologies in advance for a mammoth post!
30. The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson
Preposterous thriller about a cyber attack on the US which only the POTUS can foil. I was in search of some light relief after The Mercies and this certainly provided.
The hook here is that the book is a collaboration between an accomplished thriller writer and an actual ex-president, and who could resist a combination like that? Clinton has obviously treated the whole thing as both apologia and wish-fulfilment fantasy, with fascinating results: the narrative swerves between earnest justification for the kind of difficult and unpalatable decisions presidents have to make (would you launch a missile strike on a compound where two elusive and wanted terrorists are holed up, knowing that there are children in there? How do you keep your caucus onside without selling out your principles?) and panting adoration of the office of POTUS (and by implication, those who fill it). President Jonathan Duncan is a paragon: ex-military, he served valiantly in Iraq and suffered torture as a PoW, never betraying his country (Clinton is accused of trying to dodge the draft); he is a champion athlete and a star law student; he married his college sweetheart (just as Clinton did) and became a doting father who only child is studying abroad (just as Chelsea did); he is impeached by opportunistic Republican scoundrels but gets through on sheer charm and manly force of will; he has a chronic illness (the weirdly topical immune thrombocytopenia) but doesn't let details like a dangerously low platelet count stop him from saving the country. Unsurprisingly, he turns out to be the kind of president who will run headfirst towards gunshots rather than stay safe and let his agents deal with it, and is even instrumental in cracking the Top Sekrit cyber-terrorists' code where all the boffins have failed. The Mary Sue-ing is par for the course in this type of book, but I did raise an eyebrow when he revealed that his beloved wife had recently and conveniently died from cancer (I wonder what Hillary thinks of this 
). I assumed this was so he would be freed up to shag an intern a new love interest but he was too busy Saving The World for relationships.
Half of the chapters are narrated from the POV of a pregnant Bosnian mercenary who uses the nom de guerre "Bach" (in tribute to JS, whose works got her through a tough time in Sarajevo), and who has nicknamed her assault weapon "Anna Magdalena". As a Bach superfan, I sympathised with this probably more than I should have done (and have resolved to call myself "Bach" if I ever decide to become an international assassin).
The plot is about ... actually, who cares? It's stuffed full of explosions and weapons porn and lovingly-researched technobabble and chest-beating patriotism and macho face-offs between political opponents: basically, everything that you'd expect in a chunky thriller with gold letters on the front. I just went along with the flow, and ignored such pesky questions as "why is the main terrorist organisation called Sons of Jihad when the narrator is at such pains to assure us that they are extreme nationalists and not Islamists?" and "Why would a genius hacker create malware so sophisticated that the best coders in the US can't disarm it and then undermine it with a password so simple that even an idiot could guess it?"
I listened to this on Borrowbox, and the narration is hilariously bad: Dennis Quaid narrates the President's thoughts with the kind of gravelly tones used in trailers for action movies, several of the characters speak so robotically that I genuinely thought it was synthesised speech rather than real actors, and most of the attempted accents (Israeli, Balkan, Czech, German) are excruciating. Despite this, I found myself glued to the story and spent several days listening during every opportunity I had - while washing up, or gardening, or on the way back from the school run. Obviously, the book is complete tosh, but it was an enjoyable counterbalance to the self-conscious literariness of The Mercies and its ilk, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I lapped up every word! (Clinton and Patterson are scheduled to release a second book later this year, and I'll probably read that one as well 
.)