The President’s Daughter: An Exclusive Guest Post by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

James Patterson: What separates The President’s Daughter (and The President Is Missing) from anything I’ve written, and pretty much any mystery or thriller I’ve read, is that it’s just so authentic. Our two books stand out because of the knowledge President Clinton brings to the party. What would happen if someone tried to kidnap a president’s daughter? How could it happen? How would the Secret Service act?
President Bill Clinton: Some of the things in the new book are situations I faced when I was president, but the thing that I wanted to do was to try to make sure we sketched out accurately what the difference is between a president and a former president in terms of our relationship with the Secret Service and what they can and can’t do with our families. What you read in The President’s Daughter is real and accurate.
Suppose your daughter was kidnapped and you had no confidence that the federal government under your successor would try to save her life. If you had the skills of Matthew Keating, the former president in our novel, or if you had the contacts to amass a team with those skills, you wouldn’t let your daughter die if you could stop it.
Patterson: Keating is a human being. In a lot of movies and TV shows, they get a president up there, and they can’t create a human being. It’s bizarre. The president and I have talked about that.
Clinton: All the time. On the great days you feel like you’re being lifted up, and on the bad days you feel like you’re basically just a target. You’re never quite a three-dimensional person. We tried to make our characters real people.
Patterson: As we did our back and forth on both books, it was important to us that our fictional presidents not be perfect, because that’s not real. And Mel, Keating’s daughter, is a real character: you feel her, you’re there with her, you understand her, you root for her, and a lot of that has to do with President Clinton making sure that she rings true for readers. You get caught up in all the characters, and you really care about what’s going to happen to them.
Now, it’s all in the hands of you, the Barnes & Noble reader. We did our best to write a book where you will get a sense of the presidency and what it’s like, and hopefully you’ll enjoy the roller-coaster ride, too.