'The President's Daughter' review: She's missing in a plot held hostage

Over the past three years, Bill Clinton and James Patterson have developed a bankable formula: In their previous thriller, a U.S. president went missing. In their new thriller, a president's daughter goes missing.

If this keeps up, someday we'll have to read a thriller about the president's lost cat, his missing keys, an errant sock.

"The President's Daughter" gives us President Matthew Keating, a former Navy SEAL hero who battles a dastardly terrorist. It's a change as startling as the shift from tan to beige. At the opening, President Keating sits in the White House situation room watching a high-stakes military operation 5,000 miles away. SEAL Team Six has just landed in Libya to track down and kill Asim Al-Asheed, the world's most vicious killer. The SEALs creep silently across the desert. They spot Al-Asheed's house through their night-vision goggles. They raise their MK 13 Remington bolt-action rifles and slip into the building. Back in Washington, the generals lean toward the video screen squinting at the ghostly images about to fire. …

And then President Keating tells us how he was elected to represent Texas's 7th Congressional District, how he got picked to run as vice president, and later how he moved into the Oval Office when the former president died. He even takes a moment to explain the order of presidential succession because when SEALs are just seconds away from killing the most-wanted terrorist in a Libyan hideout, who isn't thinking about the 25th Amendment? It's a burp of irrelevant patter — and a move these two authors use repeatedly to pad out the next 600 pages.

"Meanwhile," as Keating says to wrench us back to the action, Al-Asheed escapes the SEAL team assassination, but in the chaos that unfolds, the terrorist's wife and three daughters die. Against the objections of his Cabinet members, Keating makes a public apology for the failed mission because "it's the right thing to do," and this president — gosh darn it — always does the right thing.

Al-Asheed, however, vows to wreak vengeance upon Keating no matter how long it takes.

It takes two years, by which time Keating is out of office.

While hiking nearby with her boyfriend, Keating's 19-year-old daughter Melanie is kidnapped by Al-Asheed and whisked to an undisclosed location.

The lumbering U.S. government can't or won't help, so Keating does what any dad would do: He assembles a team of death-defying Secret Service agents, rules-be-damned Navy SEALs and "a young lady … on the spectrum" who's a computer genius. Drawing inspiration from America's most advanced missiles, the text of "The President's Daughter" is capable of hitting multiple stereotypes simultaneously.

"I'm an ex-POTUS now," Keating says with his Mount Rushmore gaze. "And I'm also a father who's willing to go anywhere, and kill anyone involved, to get his daughter back." But it's not just his daughter he has to save, it's his own honor. When the Saudi intelligence agency offers to assassinate Al-Asheed for him, Keating is touched but turns them down. "I have to do this myself," he says. "For … my family."

Will Keating reach his daughter before it's too late?

Save yourself.