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Bill Clinton and James Patterson’s new novel ‘The President is Missing’ stars an attractive, pregnant, female vegetarian from Bosnia and Herzegovina who is also an assassin.
The Bosnian woman is a classical music-loving, cold-blooded killer known only by the code name Bach because she likes to listen to the compositions of Johann Sebastian while doing her job.
Britain’s Independent newspaper described Bach as a “Bosnian half-Muslim” who strides around in knee-high chocolate leather boots and sees her favoured weapon as “a thing of beauty, a matte-black semi-automatic rifle capable of firing five rounds in less than two seconds”.
But the newspaper’s review mocked the character created by Clinton and thriller writer Patterson.
“The former president and the best-selling author have come up with an absurd thriller featuring one of the most preposterous assassins committed to print,” the book review said.
The story follows a US diplomat who returns to Bosnia 20 years after war and the Srebrenica massacre that claimed a life of his friend and colleague.
American daily newspaper Newsday said that Bach “is haunted by the horrors she and her family suffered at the hands of Bosnian Serbs”.
Another of the characters in the book is a Bosnian Serb leader who “is threatening to pull Bosnia apart in a bloody struggle for control”.
Time magazine reported that it’s hard not to notice parallels between the fictional US president in the book, Jonathan Lincoln Duncan, and the co-author William Jefferson Clinton – although unlike the real former president, the fictional one is a celebrated war hero.
Clinton hosted peace talks in November 1995 which led to the Dayton agreement to end the Bosnian war.
The Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina, a non-profit organisation based in Washington, recently gave Clinton its Lifetime Achievement Award for his “dedicated leadership in ending the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina”.
Clinton is not the first former US president to write a novel; Jimmy Carter published one called ‘The Hornet’s Nest’ in 2003.
One US diplomat has also dealt with Bosnia and Herzegovina in a novel.
Matthew Palmer, the State Department’s director for South Central European Affairs, published a thriller called ‘The Wolf of Sarajevo’ in 2016.
