To Kill The President: Sam Bourne: 9780007413720: Amazon.com: Books

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To Kill The President Paperback – January 1, 2017

by Sam Bourne (Author)

4.2 4,920 ratings

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HARPER COLLINS
Publication date

January 1, 2017
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5.08 x 1.02 x 7.8 inches
ISBN-10

9780007413720
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978-0007413720
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Robert J. Canning

Prescient, with a capital WOW!

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2017

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NO SPOILERS. Not since “The DaVinci Code” have I enjoyed a classic thriller like “To Kill the President.” It was recommended to me by a 17-year-old British houseguest who was reading it during his and his family’s stay with us. I had planned to read “Hillbilly Elegy” on a vacation to Hawaii, but I took this one instead, based on the enthusiastic recommendation.

Author Jonathan Freedland (writing as Sam Bourne) grabs your attention from the very first sentence (“It began the night the President sought to bring about the end of the world” by ALMOST attacking North Korea.) How timely and topical is that? Freedland cleverly avoids naming the President or describing him physically (never a mention of the word “orange,” and I’m not being glib). However, the deceitful and deranged man in the book’s Oval Office is clearly who we KNOW it is supposed to be. Consider this passage from Page 312 (just one example) that describes You Know Who to perfection: “A single one of the episodes that happened here daily – hourly – would have been enough to destroy previous administrations. But under this President, they came in such a torrent – the tweets, the lies, the grotesque misconduct, the conflicts of interest, the acts of unwarranted aggression, the self-harming threats to American national security – that the media, the Congress, the country itself could not keep up.” (I read that passage precisely on the day You Know Who threatened North Korea and foolishly called Kim Jong Un “Rocket Man.” Prescient, with a capital WOW!)

The book is 408 pages long and even the last two pages stun you with a last minute, unexpected surprise! There are so many suspenseful twists and turns, in fact, that when I was on that flight to Hawaii, I once gasped, “Omigod!,” to the concern, then the amusement of my seatmate. I recommended the book to her and she said she would get a copy. I recommend it to you as well.

Now to “Hillbilly Elegy.”

3 people found this helpful

Very Timely, Credible, and Captivating Political Page Turner.

Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2017

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Highly recommended. A historical novel that recalls “Advise and Consent” by Allen Drury, except that the subjects are the White House staff. These individuals bear an uncanny resemblance to the current President and numerous staffers. The names have been changed, but one recognizes them instantly.
The book opens with the President, in the middle of the night, ordering a nuclear strike against North Korea and China. Fortunately, the nuclear war is averted by some quick thinking of the staff involved in the process. This is just the opening scene, however, and we dive into the action as the new President and his Chief Strategist begin to concentrate presidential power and eliminate what they refer to as the Unites States “Administrative State”.
The plot thickens as several individuals who seem to have no connection to the White House are murdered. A plot to kill the President is revealed and we see that, if successful, the killing will be done by a deranged individual. The book’s protagonist, Maggie Costello is an experienced White House staffer who discovers the plot to kill the President. She faces the moral dilemma of choosing action that may leave the country in the hands of an increasingly insane President versus committing treason against her country.
The ending is most surprising! (No spoilers here.)
What rivets the reader is that we know the major players in this story. We know their character, their moral compass, and what their vision is. Perhaps because the author is an outstanding journalist who knows politics in infinite detail, the book strikes me as being a peek into a possible future.

17 people found this helpful

Customer Since 1999

Gripping and Disheartening

Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2017

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I won't describe the plot here--other reviewers have done that. Here are my grades for the book. Entertainment value--A+, Knowledge of and perspective on American politics--A, Writing quality--C. Because of the writing quality and some holes in the plot, I would give this 3 1/2 stars if I could. But the writing is good enough that it doesn't detract from a fascinating, although disheartening, look at the current presidency. I hope that American publishers will decide to make the book available in the US.

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

A thought provoking read

Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2017

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A very interesting thriller, especially when you consider that it was published before Trump's inauguration. A dramatic opening sets a high pace from the start, and the progression of the story stays breathtaking right to the end. The author, however, makes things a bit too easy for himself by having Trump's downfall ensue from factors no one has hitherto observed in the man.

Read it if you can find it

Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2017

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This is the first fiction I’ve read in years..the first thriller in probably decades..so maybe I’m a little rusty, but I found this to be an extremely fun book.
And while the premise is troubling, the story is entirely believable. The characters are mostly well fleshed-out, and the eye for detail is impressive. “Bourne” has clearly done his research and has produced a novel that is both eerily prescient and engrossing. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to find in the US

2 people found this helpful

Cynthia Swanson

Twists and turns. Compelling!

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2019

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To be perfectly honest, I haven’t finished reading it yet. Having said that, I am on page 311, and it is one of the best books in this genre I have read in a long time. It’s thrilling and, all the way through so far., it’s had me on the edge of my chair. I’m purposely slowing down because it’s just so good!

One person found this helpful

Kindle Customer

Exciting for most of the book, but...

Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2019

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The book was fast paced and exciting for most of it, with a plot which may have seemed far fetched 5 years ago but is very credible now. The ending though was a bit of a fizzer.... All over in a paragraph by a mechanism that should be believable but doed not appear so.. We

Truth is strange!

Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2017

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Thiis is an absolute page turner. What is truly spooky is that it was written more than a year ahead of current events. Could it come to pass? Probably. Thats why you should read it.

4 people found this helpful

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Ralph Blumenau

An ingeniously plotted page turner

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 7, 2020

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The President is never named, but there is no doubt he is, in every respect, President Trump, for whom Sam Bourne (the pen name of the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland) has an undisguised hatred. Trump had become President in January 2017; Bourne’s book was published just six months later.
The episodes in the story are never exactly dated, but the President had very recently been elected, and already he is ready to launch a nuclear strike against Korea – and, for good measure, on China, too – because the young North Korean president has issued a statement describing the American as “a paper tiger, a coward and a small man”. The strike is averted, with ten seconds to spare. Only a tiny number of people know that the world had only just escaped a nuclear war. Among them is Robert Kassian, the nominal Chief of Staff, the “responsible adult in the room”, who now sees it as his duty to neutralize the President, even to the extent of working with the Chinese ambassador in Washington. Another is General Jim Bruton, the appalled Secretary of Defense. The two men examine various methods of removing the President: a medical declaration that he was unfit to hold office, or an impeachment; but none of these would work, and they came to the conclusion that the only option was to have the President killed.
The President had whipped up hatred of the Latinos. One of these had been a fellow-soldier of Bruton’s. He was an outstanding marksman and was absolutely devoted to Bruton, and Bruton recruits him to do the deed. He in turn recruits another Latino who has only weeks to live in any case, and who is prepared to play a part and give his life in the attempt.
Others who felt alarmed by the President included Maggie Costello, who had worked for the previous administration and was now working in the White House office of Crawford McNamara (Steve Bannon?), the obnoxious Counsel to the new President. She is quite a detective and works out that an apparent suicide of someone working for the President was in fact a murder, though her intuition as to who could have killed him is wrong. She also finds out how close the world had come to Mutually Assured Destruction. Her intuition also told her that there was a plot to kill the President. But, much as she hated the President, she dreaded what his assassination would do to the already deeply divided United States and thought she ought to stop the assassination.
(This quixotic trait of “doing the right thing” had, once before, made her do something that had actually contributed to the President’s victory in the presidential election of 2016. That’s one of her weaknesses. Another is that, unsuspectingly, she had for some time been sleeping with an enemy. It’s a devastating blow to her when she discovers his betrayal.)
As she now begins to probe, she runs into life-threatening danger. (The first instance of this involves some enemy of hers using some very high tech methods – an extreme example of Bourne’s fascination with computer technologies; but this one strikes me as quite unbelievable.) Someone has invalidated her pass to the White House. Her sister and two young children are also at the receiving end of a hi-tech attempt on their lives.
She even discovers the occasion and time when the President was about to be assassinated. Obviously I must not reveal what happened next, in the last quarter of the book.
Among the chapters set in America are interspersed four chapters, several days before the events in and around the White House had started, and set respectively in Iceland, in India, in England and in Namibia. In each of them, an unsuspecting man is murdered for no reason given and with apparently no connection with the story in America. Well, clever Maggie also works out how these are connected and how the President and McNamara were involved. Not that it helps her. The lesson we take away from the novel is that “liberals” like Maggie, Kassian and Bruton don’t stand a chance against the new Administration’s ruthlessness and manipulation of public opinion. That is why I think that the last four pages, which suggest that perhaps all was not lost, strike me as a cop-out and as both open-ended and quite unconvincing.
The book is ingeniously plotted, mostly a real page-turner, and just occasionally over-egging the pudding.

One person found this helpful

K E Fellows

A gripping page-turner, with real-life parallels far too close for comfort

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 4, 2017

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'To Kill the President' is very nearly as much a 'roman a clef' about the present regime in Washington as was Joe Klein's 1996 novel 'Primary Colors' about the Clintons. Anyone who doesn't see who the main players in this novel are supposed to represent simply hasn't been paying enough attention.

While contributing to the enjoyment of the book (particularly in its first half), there is a down side to this technique. If one wasn't envisioning the various 'characters' played by their real-life counterparts, I suspect that the plot would seem a tad too outrageous to take seriously. Sadly, however, as things stand in real life it is all too believable, and the novel is all the more frightening because of it. To give just one example, the story begins with the (fictional) White House occupant being prevented -- just -- from starting a nuclear war with North Korea. As I write this, the headlines are filled with news of the (actual) White House occupant taunting North Korea on Twitter following that country's latest missile test. The parallels are dizzyingly close, and they keep on coming.

Although I am a great admirer of Jonathan Freedland's journalism and essays ('Sam Bourne' is a pseudonym), I must admit that this is the first of his novels that I have read, largely because I am not a huge fan of the political thriller genre. Thus I am not familiar with his protagonist, Irish former peace negotiator/now White House foreign policy advisor Maggie Costello. Perhaps if I had read the previous novels in which she is featured I would understand her better, but coming to her cold I have to say that her characterization is one reason for my giving the book four stars instead of five. She seems likable enough, but I found it hard to believe that someone who has progressed as far and as high as she is supposed to have done would be so naively trusting, and so inclined to self-sabotage by her excessive and premature confiding of secrets. It is something that a lot of people do, but people who do it tend to short-circuit their own careers early on (in my experience at least). They don't become world-class operatives in politics and global affairs. But as I said, she is likable and most readers will be happy to cheer her on as she tackles the multiple conspiracies with which this (fictional) White House is infested.

The strongest writing in the book can be found in the sections where 'Sam Bourne' steps aside and lets Jonathan Freedland's analytical voice take over. Various characters reflect, or rant, about why such a disastrous regime is allowed to carry on...their conclusions will not be new to anyone who reads contemporary political analysis, but these little essays are eloquent as they ponder what has gone wrong. There is also a long section where one character allows himself to voice the complete and utter contempt that this fictional White House occupier and his staff feel for their 'base', and for the American people generally. This, I suspect, probably depicts quite accurately how the actual White House occupants view the people who voted for them. It makes for painful reading.

The ending is satisfying but a bit rushed (another reason for only four stars). It also turns upon a technical -- and unexplained -- 'deus ex machina' which I think could have been handled more artfully. But I am inclined to forgive the author for this; clearly he wanted to get the book written and published as quickly as possible, before real life events overtook his story. Ultimately, perhaps, the ending is also a bit over-optimistic.All I can say is that if we in the real world manage to get through the next four to eight years as lightly scathed as the inhabitants of 'To Kill the President', then we will be doing very well indeed and should count ourselves lucky.

4 people found this helpful

John Hopper

very topical thriller

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 7, 2017

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This thriller has a very topical backdrop, involving an unnamed right wing and bombastic US President who is active on Twitter and who revels in insulting and offending a wide range of people, and in brazenly ignoring evidence when devising and implementing policies. The novel starts with this tempestuous POTUS almost triggering a nuclear war by threatening to bomb both North Korea and China, after a war of words with the young leader of the former country, a threat which is only narrowly averted. Following this, the Secretary for Defense Jim Burton and the President's Chief of Staff Bob Kassian, horrified by this narrow escape and the possibility of a repeat performance by their mercurial boss, look at ways to remove him from office, beginning with impeachment or having him declared mentally unfit to rule, but then concluding that removing him by more violent means is the only possible solution. A White House employee Maggie Costello, one of the few survivors from the previous liberal Administration, stumbles across the plot and is faced with a dilemma: "No matter how much you hated this man – and, my God, there was every reason to hate him – this, surely, was not the way to get rid of him. If the reason to oppose him was because he was trashing democracy, then how could you justify removing him by the most undemocratic means of all: assassination? You’d be destroying democracy in order to save it. It was madness.....To kill the President was not only to kill one bad man. It was to kill the idea that politics is settled by argument and debate and elections". As she tries to unravel the plot and finds out more, she is increasingly attacked in mysterious and sometimes rather far fetched ways.

After a strong start with the very tense stand off between the President and his staff over the nuclear incident, and some powerful scenes when Burton and Kassian try to analyse solutions to the problem, the plot then becomes more standard conspiracy thriller, albeit with the strong (and very unsubtle) political satire. The end of the novel was rather sudden and seemed rather implausibly pat in the context of what had gone on before. Overall a good page turner, and apparently there are other novels by this author (Sam Bourne is a pseudonym for the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland) featuring Maggie Costello, who has an interesting backstory as a negotiator in trouble spots across the world.

11 people found this helpful

karin1910

Thriller vor aktuellem Hintergrund

Reviewed in Germany on August 5, 2019

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Dieser Roman beginnt mit einem Szenario, das vor ein paar Jahren noch als unrealistisch angesehen worden wäre, heute aber durchaus glaubwürdig wirkt: Stabschef Kassian und Verteidigungsminister Bruton werden mitten in der Nacht ins Weiße Haus gerufen. Der Präsident steht kurz davor, aus nichtigem Anlass einen Atomangriff auf Nordkorea und China anzuordnen, was zu einem dritten Weltkrieg mit unvorstellbaren Auswirkungen führen würde. Erst im letzten Moment kann er davon abgehalten werden.
Kassian und Bruton sind schockiert und beschließen, alles Nötige zu unternehmen, um eine weitere derartige Eskalation zu verhindern. Sie kommen bald zu dem Schluss, dass eine Ermordung des Präsidenten die einzige Möglichkeit dafür ist.
Auch Maggie Costello arbeitet im Weißen Haus, obwohl sie der neuen Regierung sehr ablehnend gegenübersteht. Als sie einen scheinbaren Selbstmord begutachten soll, ziehen ihre Ermittlungen immer weitere Kreise und sie kann schließlich einige dunkle Machenschaften aufdecken.

Obwohl dem Text die Standardformel im Sinne von "Jede Ähnlichkeit mit echten Personen ist Zufall" vorangestellt wird, ist natürlich leicht erkennbar, wer für den (im Buch namenlosen) Präsidenten Modell stand. Für meinen Geschmack hat sich der Autor dabei sogar zu getreulich an sein Vorbild bzw die aktuelle politische Situation in den USA gehalten. Ein etwas subtileres und somit zeitloseres Portrait hätte ich besser gefunden.
Auch der Inhalt als solches ist durchwachsen. Die Handlung schreitet flott voran, es wird viel Spannung aufgebaut und einige Wendungen sind wirklich überraschend (andere weniger).
Die Geschichte hat allerdings kaum Tiefgang. Man hätte aus der Grundidee mehr machen können. Insbesondere wird das moralische Dilemma eines "Tyrannenmordes" nur in ein paar Nebensätzen thematisiert.
Weiters bleiben die meisten Protagonisten zu blass und eindimensional. Lediglich Maggie, deren Part im Lauf der Zeit immer größer wird und die man wohl als Hauptfigur bezeichnen kann, sticht diesbezüglich etwas heraus. Auch wenn sie angesichts all der Erfahrung, über die sie verfügen soll, auf mich zu naiv und unsicher wirkte.
Die Geschichte wird dann immerhin zu einem vielleicht nicht 100%ig realistischen, aber doch positiven Abschluss gebracht.

Alles in allem ist dieser Thriller für an der aktuellen amerikanischen Politik Interessierte, die über ein paar Schwächen (sowie die inflationäre Verwendung von Schimpfwörtern) hinwegsehen können, durchaus empfehlenswert.

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stoker

Convincing plot well told

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 5, 2022

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In the Trump era this is frighteningly plausible and might easily have happened.
Good read if you like a thriller and are concerned about the abuse of power

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