Book Review Club November 2021 - State of Terror

This month I will be reviewing three books.  Here I will be reviewing State of Terror by Louise Penny and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

It's been a while since I've read this many books between book club meetings, much less like them all and want to review them!  Having said that, I really liked this book.

I saw interviews with Louise Penny and Hillary Clinton talking about this book.  They said they wanted to write a realistic book about being the Secretary of State, particularly when you were coming into a new administration that follows an administration lead by an incompetent president.  Their jabs at Trump aren't even remotely subtle.  The former president's name is Eric Dunn - nicknamed Eric Dumb.  He withdrew from the Iran nuclear treaty, negotiated a withdrawal from Afghanistan without a plan or conditions on the Taliban, demanded loyalty, called press conferences for the sole purpose of telling lies and calling the press "fake news", among other things.  Oh, and after he lost the election, moved to Florida while his "followers" planned coup that would put him back into office while in league with terrorists and dictators.  Sound familiar?  I thought so too.

Anyway, Ellen Adams is the Secretary of State and the president who appointed her doesn't much like her but she was a vocal critic of him during the campaign so he figured the best way to shut her up was to give her a place in his cabinet.  His goal is to make her look bad so he can fire her but she's not going to make it easy on him.

A bomb goes off in a bus in London.  While the US is trying to get intelligence on it a second bomb goes off on a bus in Paris.  A staff member under the SOS receives an odd email that her supervisor tells her to delete as spam.  The staff member does so but not before she copies what the email said.  She later figures out it's a code and that there is a third bomb scheduled to go off, and soon.

The events that follow and their determination to find out who is behind the bombings. lead them to the conclusion that these bombings were intended as just a distraction, that the main event is much larger and will happen on American soil.  The SOS and her team are frantically working to figure out who is behind the threat and trying to eliminate the threat before it is too late.

This is a fast paced, page turning thriller that I didn't want to put down.  It was very well written and given the situation we find ourselves in after the last administration, all too realistic.  The thought that went through my head is that we shouldn't be putting these ideas out there for people to copy!  But it was a good story and a book I would recommend highly for anyone who enjoys thrillers, or just good books in general. 

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