Hillary Clinton’s new thriller is a paranoid fever dream

You already know that State of Terror, Hillary Clinton’s new novel, written in collaboration with the best-selling author Louise Penny, is going to be awful. You want to why. If the novel is a corpse then let this critic be the coroner.

To be fair, State of Terror offers as much literary competence as you would expect from the sort of weighty thriller you’d pick up in a train station if you’d forgotten your charger. Penny is a pro. The pacing is respectable. The characters are numerous enough that you forget that none of them are especially well-developed. There are stylistic howlers — a Russian dictator has ‘a coldness that would have given Siberia a chill,’ which makes no sense at all — but what do you expect?

What makes this book entertaining are its politics. You can no more separate art from ideology in the case of State of Terror than you can a man from his vital organs.