I really should have read this before reading Protect and Defend by Richard North Patterson, because many of the issues and some major characters are found in both books and No Safe Place is first chronologically.Kerry Kilcannon is following in the footsteps of his assassinated brother, James ) who had been running for the presidency. We learn more of Kerry's character through assorted flashbacks to his early experiences having to deal with corruption in the prosecutor's office where he had been relegated to the unit trying spousal abuse cases. (There is a link to an earlier case that I found completely unbelievable and unnecessary, but aside from that, things fit.)
Kerry is trying to pry the Democratic presidential nomination away from an insipid vice-president, Dick Mason. The Mason camp has discovered a secret in Kerry's past, that he, while still married, had had an affair with Lara Costello, a reporter. That she had aborted Kerry's child is not yet known and not revealed until the sequel, but it's a tantalizing bit of suspense for the reader. Lara has now been asked to cover the Kilcannon campaign, and the information has been released secretly to other reporters who are desperate to have it confirmed so they can target Kilcannon and Lara. Kerry is also being tracked by Sean Burke, a fanatical right-to-lifer, who has come to California to kill Kerry having killed several people at a Boston abortion clinic.
Patterson is marvelous at sympathetically portraying the many shades of complicated issues and showing how politics and the press manipulate the issues to their own benefit. As I noted in my review of Protect and Defend, Patterson has done lots of research into the workings of politics and its competing forces, and his novels, particularly the more recent ones, reek of authenticity. All of the characters are revealed as intensely human with multiple flaws and passions. Clearly he argues for candidates who understand life’s ambiguities and aren't afraid to express their doubts rather than consistently mouth the usual platitudes. It comes across as more real than reality.
It must be difficult to write a "realistic" novel when reality has begin to mock itself. After all, we just went through, as critic Daniel Pink wrote, "a president turn[ing:] the Oval Office into a love hutch for himself and his chipmunky White House intern, while a maniacal prosecutor establishes his own fourth branch of government to hunt down her presidentially embossed cocktail dress."
