The Next President by Joseph Flynn

You've been trained as a sniper and sent to Vietnam. You were good, but a shady branch of the Army, ostensibly to investigate 'shrinkage' of materials grabbed you. The unit was actually about shrinking the number of enemy leaders. Also managed to 'shrink' a US Army officer who was aiding and abetting the enemy. That one was off the books on your own dime. Did your tours, came home, got married, went into the clothing biz with your wife and relocated from southern Illinois to California. Had a son. Did pretty well and made a fistful of money. Then divorced. Your son decides he wants to go to college back in Illinois and enrolls in SIU-Carbondale, way down there closer to KY than anyplace else. 

By most definitions, living large in SoCal.

Sure there was that little flap after 'Nam with a KY loser whose family the Cade's have been feuding with for dang near 100 years. He pissed you off, but the creep died in a car-deer wreck on a back county road. That seemed like a good time to make that move to SoCal.

It's now 2004. The first legitimate black presidential candidate is preparing for an outdoor speech on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago. He takes the stage, bends over to hug a baby, and a bullet zips over his head. The shot was taken from well over a half mile away so the trigger was pulled ahead of his bending over. Lucky. No traces of who or where the shot came from are found.

A new KY thug is dead. Supposedly blew himself up when the IED he was making exploded. Said IED was set to be payback for a guy who wouldn't pay protection. Evan Cade is the prime suspect. See his girlfriend was the daughter of the guy who failed to pay up and everyone figures Evan was just standing up for his girlfriend's father.

Evan Cade, son of JD Cade, businessman with a past that few know about. And still a damn good shot.

JD and Evan are stuck. A quiet Treasury Department program has framed Evan in order to blackmail JD into killing the favored candidate. Kill Franklin Delano Rawley or your son will in all likelihood be found tortured and dead, in all appearances at the hands of their sworn KY enemies, but we all know whose hand would strike the fatal blows.

After the Chicago miss, JD follows Rawley to the LA swing of stops and with a couple careful (and pricey) donations to the Rawley campaign, manages to get close to the staff and the candidate. All the while he is trying to figure out how to kill Rawley, who is pulling the strings, and what can be done to get himself out of this mess, save his son, and avoid the assassination.

OK, now let's see if I have all this straight -
mountain boy turned Army sniper during Vietnam: check
still a great shot even into his 60s: check
very clever in manipulating people and circumstances without firing a shot: check
has a child whose very safety depends on his every move: check
author/character: Stephen Hunter/Bob Lee Swagger: nope

While the backstory of JD Cade bears a striking similarity to Hunter's Swagger, old Bob Lee labored outside of prime time politics while JD is smack in the middle and doing his best to survive and save his son. My first foray into the world according to Flynn was the very readable Tall Man in Ray Bans, recently reviewed here. I liked it enough to check out another title from the library. As good as Hunter and his Bob Lee books? Nope. Good enough to want to look at more titles? You bet. It does not appear that Flynn has developed the Cade character into a series (pity), but he does have a series of political thrillers about the husband of the first woman President, which I will be exploring in the near future. Not ready for a place in the power rotation, but just might be a player 'to be named later' depending on the comings and goings of the first husband.

ECD