Hillary Clinton to write novel with Canadian author Louise Penny

“Writing a thriller with Louise is a dream come true,” Clinton said of her Knowlton, Que.-based co-writer in a statement on Tuesday. “I’ve relished every one of her books and their characters as well as her friendship. Now we’re joining our experiences to explore the complex world of high stakes diplomacy and treachery. All is not as it first appears.”

Penny is an award-winning author whose novels include The Cruelest Month and The Brutal Telling.  

In a statement, she said she could not “say yes fast enough” to the chance of working with Clinton.

“What an incredible experience, to get inside the State Department. Inside the White House. Inside the mind of the secretary of state as high stake crises explode,” she said. “Before we started, we talked about her time as secretary of state. What was her worst nightmare? State of Terror is the answer.”

Not the only novelist in the family

Fiction writing and worst-case scenarios have become a favourite pastime for Clinton and her husband, former U.S. president Bill Clinton. He collaborated with James Patterson on the million-selling cyber thriller The President is Missing, and on a new novel, The President’s Daughter, which comes out in June.

Hillary Clinton, secretary of state during Barack Obama’s first term as president, has written a handful of nonfiction works. They include the memoir Living History and Hard Choices, which covered her time with Obama, who defeated her in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. What Happened focused on her stunning loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

State of Terror appears to draw not just on her years as secretary of state, but on her thoughts about the Trump administration’s “America First” foreign policy.

According to Simon & Schuster and St. Martin’s, the main character is “tasked with assembling a team to unravel the deadly conspiracy, a scheme carefully designed to take advantage of an American government dangerously out of touch and out of power in the places where it counts the most.”