Parker Hudson’s Novel ‘The President’ is a Fantastic Read

Editor’s note — click here to visit Parker Hudson’s website.

Here is the paragraph describing Parker Hudson’s novel The President at Amazon.com:

Originally published in 1995, The President reads like today’s newspaper. Mid-way through his term, a secular-humanist President becomes a Christian and has to decide how his new worldview must change his policies. His wife, children, siblings, staff and the entire nation grapple with how his new faith informs his actions. Meanwhile, terrorists are plotting to detonate a nuclear warhead in New York. The many strands of the story all come together in Manhattan as the terrorists use the World Trade Towers to launch their attack, the center of action is a place called Ground Zero and one of the characters yells, “Let’s Roll” near the end. The President is a gripping action thriller with a strong Christian message for the individual and the nation.

Here is my review of the book first posted at Amazon.com:

There are only a few things in Parker Hudson’s novel The President that give away the fact that it was written in the early and mid-1990s. Smart phones, the Internet and the new media don’t make an appearance. The rest of the story, however, isn’t “ripped from the headlines,” it foresaw today’s headlines with an uncanny prescience.

Of course the story itself is big — a missing nuclear warhead, jihad, the clash of left and right, and aspects of the culture war on steroids. What happens when a president gets elected and in his first year undergoes a change of heart?

Taking the leader of the free world on such an inner journey would seem to be a tough job for a writer to accomplish, but Hudson pulls it off. Another difficult task, it seems to me, is to avoid offending those of us with a low tolerance for forced dialogue or the generic action sequence. When I read it again I’ll check to see if I missed any examples of things that don’t quite “work.” None come to mind. And yes, having read through its 500 pages I was left wanting more. It’s been twenty years since it was published and no sequel is in the works, so the only way to get more is to watch the movie again. And Hudson’s pacing makes it seem as if that’s just what you’re doing.

No doubt many fans of Crichton, Clancy, Grisham, Thor, and others, enjoy reading their books for many reasons — to escape, to learn, to keep their imagination muscles active — and of course for sheer entertainment. It’s also a good guess that some, if not many of those fans who have a Judeo-Christian worldview might sense deep down something missing from those stories, something left out. Not fatal to the plot or the action, but absent nonetheless.

The founding of America is one of the best true stories in history, and what has been taking place culturally in America over the past many decades is one of the worst. What if leadership arose to issue a challenge to the nation to return to the principles that made our country what it became at its best?

I just finished the book on Tuesday, and can think of no better time to buy and read The President than in a presidential election year. It will read just as well in the early months of a new administration. No matter which candidate wins this November, however, there are many reasons the popularity of Parker Hudson’s The President should reach new heights of popularity.