Don’t be mad at me. But this book was not good. It did not help that then we have Armand Gamache and the village of Three Pines come into play which makes me shudder about where Penny plans on taking that series. The characters were not developed very well (and this is in a 500 page book). The writing was repetitive and I honestly don’t want to read the words Madame Secretary for like a fortnight. The flow was awful. The setting of the White House, Florida, and to other countries was just ugh. I don’t know. The ending just made me sigh. I imagine that means there’s another book coming set in this world and I am a hard freaking pass.
“State of Terror” follows Secretary of State, Ellen Adams. The story starts with Adams apparently having a terrible time of it in Korea. We don’t really know what happened, but that she looked bad. And then of course she rushes back to the United States for the State of the Union address by President Williams. Adams knows that she was set up to look bad and then to be fired by the new President, but instead she ends up getting kudos by the media. However, when a terrorist plot to explode nuclear arms on U.S. soil, Adams and the President have to work together to find the traitor in their midst.
Look, I get a lot of people are saying Adams is a stand-in for Clinton, but my God. No. Besides the different backstories, it makes zero sense why Williams would have appointed her Secretary of State, and it’s even dumber that she would have taken it considering her animosity for the guy. That whole plot point never worked for me and I hated how many times it got brought up.
Also Adams is kind of a terrible mother. I think at one point I gave up figuring out what was going on with her children who I called plot device #2, and #3.
The other characters are so very thin. And then of course we get Armand Gamache in this one and at that point I was truly over things.
Of course we have a Donald Trump stand in, but honestly, I didn’t care, and once again this book was too bloated with the amount of characters/actions/plots that were running throughout.
The plot made me sigh and honestly, can we stop having Muslim people as terrorists? The only thing I will say which was welcomed was that this book did pick up the new focus on white domestic terrorists (hello you Q and America First people) so that part did feel realistic. But the dark dark web thing and the code and all of that just made me roll my eyes.
The writing was not great, very stilted. I know some people want to blame Clinton for this, but this is reminiscent of many of Penny’s last few books. Each chapter ends on a cliffhanger. There are red herrings and twists throughout. And somehow Gamache is there and steady, no matter what. I just think this book needed a strong edit.
The flow was a joke. I felt like I was making no progress and would just sigh that after reading for 10 or more minutes I maybe had a 1 percent progress in my reading.
The settings were not that important.
The ending left things once again on a cliffhanger (which I freaking hate as a reader) and of course you have to know this is probably going to impact the next book in the Gamache series and I assume there is going to be another Clinton/Penny collaboration following Secretary Adams.