Spoilers!
I’d like to do more research on this, but I have a sense that the 1990s were largely the start of political thrillers that centered the White House and/or its occupants, either as protagonists and targets or antagonists and the killers. JFK in 1991 and In the Line of Fire in 1993 were huge movies for political thrillers. Murder at 1600 and Harrison Ford in Air Force One both came out in 1997. The West Wing started in 1999. A book that slots nicely into the zeitgeist of the time is James Patterson’s third Alex Cross book, 1996’s Jack and Jill. Not only is Cross dealing with brutal child slayings — pointedly, of Black boys and girls in Southeast D.C., destined to be put on the backburner in his estimation — but there is a team of assassins fittingly calling themselves Jack and Jill, who are not only targeting celebrities, but ultimately, the president of the United States.
The Jack and Jill tandem “came to the Hill to kill” a sitting U.S. Senator, a movie star, one of the president’s mistresses, a Japanese businessman (this one in California), and ultimately, the president of the United States, with the help of another assassin, or “ghost,” trained by the CIA. Jack and Jill is actually Jeanne and Brett; she’s the Inspector General of the CIA and he’s her husband. Brett also used a woman who worked in communications at the White House to infiltrate the White House before killing her, too. Fortunately for Cross and the Secret Service, she kept a recording of the Senator’s slaying that identified Brett. Both are arrested and then mysteriously killed (or kill themselves?) in federal prison … somehow.
As for the child-killer, he was a child himself, a 13-year-old foster child who was angry at the world and off of his bipolar disorder medication apparently. Cross is able to stop him, but not before he holds the principal of the local school Cross’ kids attend hostage and kills her husband. (Naturally, after this, Cross seems to “get the girl,” as it were.) I think the child-killer case was used as a plot device for two reasons. First, to juxtapose how killings of Black kids take a backseat to the deaths of “important people.” Two, to amplify Patterson’s theme throughout that America seems off the tracks, veering into carnage and mayhem. He repeatedly wonders (through the Cross character), why America has so many psychopaths and monsters. This child-killer being only one example. Jack and Jill another two examples.
Unlike the previous book in the series I reviewed and had a litany of plot holes to point out, I don’t here. I mean, yes, it’s largely unrealistic to me that the third assassin in the conspiracy is able to not only set off a bomb in Madison Square Garden where the president and a small army of security are, but is then able to follow it up by shooting and killing the president. But I can suspend my disbelief there. The bigger issue is singular. Patterson never explains why Jack and Jill did what they did, or the third assassin, or the White House communications woman. What was their motive for going after the Senator and the movie star? Then, to kill the president? “Jill,” aka Jeanne, gives us some insight, mainly, that the president is a “car dealer from Detroit who doesn’t know anything.” Which is to say, he was disrupting the intelligence apparatus of the U.S. government. So, he had to go. But who ordered it (if they didn’t act alone, which nobody thinks)? We don’t know that, either. Which is also apiece with Patterson’s theme throughout that the biggest crimes of the 20th century, primarily the assassinations of JFK and then RFK (perhaps MLK, too), remain mysteries where not everything is “tied up nice and neat with a bright ribbon and bow on the package,” as Cross mentions. Although, it’s amusing that Patterson through Cross is expressing conspiracy theories about those assassinations. I also think it’s interesting how different our orientation is now compared to the 1990s. In Patterson’s book, it’s right-wing zealots who are trying to kill a populist outsider president for going after, well, the “deep state.” Sound familiar? In the 21st century, Trump supporters think the left-wing deep state is out to get him for being a populist outsider.
Overall, as I suspected might happen, the third book in the Cross series is the best so far. I suspected it because authors tend to find their groove with these series as they go along (see: Lee Child, Vince Flynn, Jeffery Deaver, and so on). This was another barn-burner through the “carnage and mayhem” of America, where psychopaths seem to be on every street corner, apparently in Southeast D.C. and on the corner of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Milam's Musings 