Presidents' Day

Seth Margolis has written eight books, and his latest, Presidents’ Day will released next month, in February 2017. This is a story of political intrigue that is particularly timely. One of the world’s wealthiest men wants to rig the US election for President. Does that ring a bell? However, rather than run for office himself, Julian Mellow wanted to stay in the background where he had spent most of his life. Meanwhile, he had made millions on a deal five years earlier as the result of insider trading, and when that was discovered, Mellow managed to hang the blame on his longtime protégée, Zach Springer. Zach was terminated from Mellow’s finance firm, forced to cough up almost all of the money he had earned during his years in Mellow’s company, and been banned from working in the financial industry forever.

And Zach could not let it go. He was determined to catch Mellow in some illegal act, and he was obsessed with following Mellow’s every move. As the result of this obsession, his relationship with his fiancée was on the rocks. Only Zach’s maniacal focus led him to uncover Mellow’s plot to win the White House through his control of Senator Harry Lightstone. Lightstone didn’t want the job of President, but Mellow blackmailed him into running for the office by threatening to reveal his sexual proclivities. Still, Lightstone was a long shot and Mellow was known never to bet on a loser.

It was specifically the death of Mellow’s son Matthew some years earlier in the political backwater of the small African country of Kamalia for which Mellow was seeking revenge. A US President could bring an end to he regime that had murdered his son. Matthew, unlike Springer, had been one who wanted nothing to do with his father and had literally gone to the end of the earth to get away from his influence and control. Margolis skillfully surrounded his main characters with a solid cast, including Matthew’s fiancée, a native Kamalian, Sophie DuVal, a former French fashion model, and Mellow’s hatchet man, Billy Sandifer, the scariest of psychopaths.

Margolis did a great job of tying the plots together in a believable sequence. The plot is not too complex, but it kept me guessing. Do the good guys always win? Not necessarily, and you’ll have to read this one to get the answer. I’ve already downloaded Margolis’ prior book The Semper Sonnet. ECD already wrote a less than stellar review of that one, but I plan to get to that one soon.