Accompanied by a single female Secret Service agent Helen Wills, Myra McPherson, the wife of the President of the United States, comes unannounced to his office. The First Lady asks him to start divorce proceedings. She is not very forthcoming about her reasons or her intentions other than she and her eight-year-old son Randy need to escape the confining atmosphere of the White House. She signs the necessary paper David will need to file and leaves.

Benjamin Larsen is an unstable computer games developer and player who is employed by Wilson Boswell, a completely immoral computer software and business tycoon. Boswell has promoted his relationship with several politicians and now has unfettered access to the Oval Office through his close connection with the President, a former Texas senator. He has placed some of his own people on the President’s staff.

The President is strongly opposed to his wife divorcing him; it will badly damage his image as a devoted family man. Men purporting to be Secret Service agents arrive at David’s office and go through his files removing the signed document. He gets a cryptic unsigned email asking for help and goes to Washington to see if Myra is still set on divorce. Brief conversations with her at the White House and by phone convince him she is.

David sees on television that Myra and Randy have left Washington and are vacationing in South Carolina. Helen Wills contacts him. The First Lady and first son are not in South Carolina. The First Lady has been sequestered in an ultra-secret mental health/drug facility, and Randy is at a summer camp for the children of the wealthy. She enlists his assistance in freeing them: she will rescue the First Lady, David is to recover Randy.

Randy has knowledge about secret communications developments. Boswell knows the potential for danger this presents. He assigns Larsen, who is becoming even more dangerous and unstable, to track them and handle the problem. More perils threaten than merely the First Family’s marital troubles.

Author Jay Brandon is known for his legal thrillers. His protagonist is usually a principled attorney whose defense of his client throws him into the center of a murder investigation. Executive Privilege is a slight departure from this formula; it is decidedly weighted towards the standard thriller mode with fewer legal overtones.

David Owens, however, young, idealistic, and committed, is cut from the usual mold and is one of Brandon’s best heroes. The novel’s success can be directly attributed to its likeable hero and the reader’s empathy with him. He’s not a super-hero but a relatively ordinary man thrust into an extraordinary situation. Even though Myra McPherson is facing a nearly hopeless situation, David is still the more sympathetic character. The author ought to consider featuring David again in a future novel. Wilson Boswell (obviously modeled on Bill Gates) and Benjamin Larsen are less successful characters because they are so unrelentingly evil and one-dimensional.

Boswell, his unscrupulous cohorts including Larsen, a Big Brother-like communications device, and Randy’s in-depth knowledge of a plot to divert email all serve to muddy the plot somewhat. Readers who particularly enjoy Jay Brandon’s legal thrillers because of the taut courtroom scenes may be slightly disappointed - there’s relatively little courtroom action. The primary focus in Executive Privilege is on the flight from the bad guys rather than legal maneuvering. But the book’s strong hero and intriguing premise of the First Lady divorcing an acting President are enough to warrant its recommended rating.

--Lesley Dunlap