Bill and James' excellent adventure

Winnipeg Free Press

21-06-2025

What if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, making her president, and making husband Bill Clinton the first first gentleman in U.S. history — and deep into her first term, Bill had been charged with murder?
Oh dear.
And that's pretty much all you need to know before launching into the third collaboration between former president Bill Clinton and super-prolific thriller author James Patterson, following The President is Missing and The President's Daughter.
Bebeto Matthews / Associated Press files
Bill Clinton (left) and James Patterson… TK
We've got a courtroom drama, political thriller and police procedural all rolled into one that's both preposterous and preposterously entertaining.
The first gentleman is Cole Wright, husband of President Madeleine Wright; he's a former tight end with the New England Patriots, one of whose cheerleaders he is accused of murdering 17 years ago.
The big difference this time around is that Cole isn't the first-person narrator, after two whiz-bang novels in which the narrator was a male president who was the greatest warrior in the U.S. of A.
No, this time our narrator is a Black woman lawyer and Yale law professor, Brea Cooke (check the initials). She's been researching a book about the disappearance and presumed death of cheerleader Suzanne Bonanno, and had been working along with Brea's romantic and professional partner Garrett Wilson, an investigative reporter.
The first few pages tell us Cole is going to trial on the charges, Garrett is dead and it's flashback time.
President Maddy is a Democrat, who stands by her man but believes his conviction would scuttle her re-election chances.
Clinton and Patterson obviously started writing this book before the most recent election, back when presidents didn't mess with the justice system's independence. Spoiler alert — the word 'pardon' never appears herein.
Brea and Garrett met at Dartmouth, the Ivy League school where a generation earlier, Cole, Maddy and her chief of staff Burton had all hung out together. There are rumours of a young woman's having been raped at a frat party full of football players, but all witnesses were bought or threatened into silence.
People who know something about the dead cheerleader having dated Cole, and he having allegedly treated her violently before she vanished, start getting murdered. Who could have seen this coming?
Brea knows she's being followed by two shady characters, we know a minor-league mobster has unleashed thugs, we know there's a professional hitperson with a sniper rifle stalking a whole lot of people, we know several conspiracies and cabals are feeding Brea clues for reasons unknown, we know intrepid homicide detective Marie Gagnon is refusing to drop her sleuthing — oodles of mysterious stuff we know, without knowing a lot of the why and by whom.
The First Gentleman
Why did the authors choose the New England Patriots? Maybe because the Pats had a real-life tight end named Aaron Hernandez who was charged with three murders and convicted of one murder. But we digress…
While her husband is on trial, President Maddy is busy trying to stop China from invading the Philippines without starting a war, and she's trying to get enough votes from both parties (Bill probably wrote this part) for a rainbows-and-unicorns plan to prevent the States from going bankrupt, by increasing taxes on the wealthy to keep basic programs such as social security and Medicaid solvent.
Bill, in what parallel universe did you find these agreeable Republicans?
Readers may spend several chapters thinking The First Gentleman will concentrate on violence against women. Then they may think the authors are questioning why a young man who won the gene pool and then married into unimaginable power and wealth should lose everything because of one incident that he now acts in public as though he regrets.
Ultimately, the authors have used a devastating societal ill as simply a plot device on which to hang another thriller full of Clinton's intriguing insights into politics and Patterson's bang-bang, never-stop-for-breath plots.
Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin reckons American football coaches will rapidly turn pages for clues how one tight end can turn a small school like Dartmouth, where players are required to go to class and pass courses, into a national university football power.