A Conspiracy Theory That Makes Me Nervous

Book Review

State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny

“Hillary Clinton’s thriller with Louise Penny is a thinly veiled jab at a Very Stable Genius.” This is the title of a book review of State of Terror written by Ron Charles, the book editor of The Washington Post. His title alone gives you a clue whether you will love or hate this book. If things aren’t obvious enough, Mr. Charles’ begins his review this way, “At the start of 2016, Hillary Rodham Clinton resolved that she would not respond to Donald Trump’s insults. Turns out she was just storing up her responses to unleash in her first novel.”

The novel tells the story of the newly elected U.S. President, Doug Williams, and his Secretary of State, Ellen Adams. They follow the administration of Eric Dunn, a.k.a., Eric the Dumb, who botched everything he touched.

As the book opens, terrorist attacks — bus bombings — take place in Paris, London, and Frankfurt. The U.S. figures out that these attacks are connected to Dr. Bashir Shah, a nuclear physicist and arms dealer. They also figure out that the next attacks will take place in three major American cities simultaneously. The confusing thing about all this is that Dr. Shah is under house arrest in Pakistan, so how is it possible for him to be causing all this destruction? That’s when we learn that in the waning days of Dumb Dunn’s presidency, he insisted that the Pakistani government release Shah. And they did!

As Dunn ultimately explains to Ellen Adams, Shah is a genius and an entrepreneur with whom he has a lot in common. Shah is a businessman wrongly accused of being an arms dealer! He sells nuclear energy, not nuclear weapons! Shah’s bad press is all fake news of course.

In the end, Ron Charles and I have different opinions of the book. He calls it, “wholly ridiculous but consistently entertaining.” He gives us a belly laugh when he says, “The only person standing between America the Beautiful and nuclear annihilation is a disheveled woman wearing Spanx.”

I, on the other hand, was somewhat frightened by the book. Anyone can write about conspiracies against America-as-we-know-it, but when a former Secretary of State spins an entire book on such concepts, it makes me a bit nervous.

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