America’s Last Days by Douglas Mackinnon

". . . a brand-name political thriller."

America’s Last Days is a brand-name political thriller—a book full of brand names. The story concerns a military conspiracy to take over the U.S. government, and, unlike a lot of paranoid literature, it is an equal opportunity read for nervous people on both sides of the aisle, containing blurbs by both Bob Dole and James Carville. Neither is famous for literary acuity, but they suggest that the author is unusually well connected in political circles and is good on the details of plot and setting, falling back on those brand names for backup. In one sentence a character “takes his eighteen-karat gold Cross pen from his white Kenneth Cole button-down shirt.” This kind of shorthand description makes the reviewer wonder if the author obtained sponsorship for what some people would call product placement.

In addition to his political blurbers, the author, a syndicated columnist and political commentator who has worked in the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, and the White House, has secured advance blurbs from Larry King and Tom Brokaw, who describes the novel as “Seven Days in May for the Internet generation. MacKinnon aspires to compete with the likes of Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey, and, if he is very lucky, his story might sell to the modern-day successors of John Frankenheim, whose movie of that forgotten 1962 novel has lasted into the twenty-first century.

Reviewer: Beth Hadas