THE DEVIL’S BED

Above-average suspenser about a stand-up Secret Service agent who falls for FLOTUS.

First Lady of the United States, that is, in case your Beltway Buzz-worder hasn’t been updated recently: in this case, the beautiful, bright, terribly troubled Kathleen Jorgenson Dixon. The thing is that Kate’s lost confidence in her husband. Clay Dixon, former pro-football star, came to the presidency imbued with a heroic sense of mission too soon squandered by the exigencies of practical politics. Kate deplores this, considers it a form of betrayal, insists to Clay that he’s surrounded himself with egregious opportunists, not the least of whom is his own unprincipled father, the sinister senior senator from Colorado. So serious is the rift between FLOTUS and POTUS that Kate has moved from the connubial quarters to the Lincoln Bedroom. “I used to sleep in a great man’s bed,” she tells Clay bitterly. “I want to remember what that was like.” Then suddenly, back in Minnesota, Kate’s father suffers a mysterious accident. Or was it? Secret Service Agent Bo Thorsen—brave, resourceful, smitten—doesn’t think so. He’s become convinced that Kate’s been lured home because someone—a diabolically clever and unequivocally lethal someone—wants her more accessible: it’s a trap, in other words. No one believes him, except Kate, who trusts him on sight and whose feeling for him no doubt transcends what is seemly, though both behave with admirable and honorable restraint. So who wants to murder an extremely popular First Lady? Is she the target of highly placed conspirators, seeking to forestall, at any cost, the negative impact of a divorced president? Or is the villain a more personal bête noire, a nightmarish figure out of Kate’s own long-ago, not a whit less deadly for being half-forgotten?

Krueger, author of the Cork O’Connor mystery series (Purgatory Ridge, 2001, etc.), keeps his complex plot chugging along on track until an overwrought and overlong last act derails it.