Hope Never Dies

Hope Never Dies, by Andrew Shaffer, is a delightful book with a delicious premise: Barack Obama and Joe Biden as a latter-day Holmes and Watson, solving a murder mystery. Shaffer writes that when he suggested it to his agent she responded simply, "OMG."

Shaffer's best decision is to have Biden, like his counterpart Watson, narrate. When we meet him, he's grumpy and quick to anger, annoyed that he hasn't heard from Obama. His Secret Service protection has run out, and he's tired of watching Obama hobnob with the jet set. Then Obama shows up in his backyard.

It turns out that a conductor on Amtrak, who, Biden got to know (he was known as "Amtrak Joe," after all) has died with a map of Biden's house in his possession. He was run over by a train. Was it suicide, an accident, or murder? He was found with heroin on him. Biden can't believe his friend would be mixed up in anything illegal, so looks into it. Obama helps.

If Biden is a crotchety old man (he is constantly complaining of aches and pains) Obama is the cool dude (he says he's as "cool as cucumber lotion") with a huge Escalade and a Secret Service agent, Steve, who goes along with them but voices his concerns. They end up at a seedy Wilmington hotel (this is the first mystery I know of that is set in Delaware) and gets mixed up with a motorcycle gang.

Shaffer's voice for Biden is so great that I hope that's how Biden really is. He says things like, "Barack didn’t have any medical training, as far as I knew. But his brain absorbed everything. If it came down to it, I had faith that he could deliver a baby. Maybe even perform a circumcision." He comments on the current administration: "The current administration knew how to do one thing right: If you wanted to push through an unpopular agenda with minimal resistance, distract the bastards. Do something every day to grab the headlines—something big, bold, and preferably stupid—thereby banishing the dull stories about how you were systematically dismantling the country to the back pages with the Hagar comics." And he contemplates whether to run for president in 2020, which is exactly what he is doing now.

Of course the novel takes these two into impossibly fun scenarios, like Biden chasing after a motorcycle in his Dodge Challenger, or hanging by his fingers off the end of a train. This is the first in a series.

It made me think about other presidents and vice-presidents teaming up to solve crimes. FDR and Truman might be fun, as would JFK and LBJ. I shudder to think about Trump and Pence. They would probably be the criminals. Maybe Trump can be Obama and Biden's Dr. Moriarty.