THRILLERS: The President’s Daughter, Bill Clinton & James Patterson, Century, $32.99
State of Terror, Hillary Rodham Clinton & Louise Penny, Macmillan, $32.99

His begins on board a Black Hawk helicopter somewhere off the coast of Libya on a clandestine special forces operation that will inevitably go pear-shaped. Hers opens with an exhausted and dishevelled Secretary of State just back from a humiliating diplomatic failure in Seoul and already late for a State of the Union address. Both of them feature dastardly terrorist threats emanating from the Middle East that will have dire repercussions for close friends, family and America. But there the similarity ends.

Except, of course, that you can’t help wondering just how much of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton there is in these fast-paced political thrillers and to what degree this was tempered by the wisdom of their co-writers, the impossibly best-selling James Patterson and Canadian treasure Louise Penny, whose Inspector Gamache manages to make a cameo late in the day.

For Bill and James, it’s the second time round the block (after The President Is Missing) in what often reads like a boy’s own adventure. There’s a lot of attention to the kinds of military and weapons technology that is largely a waste of space for those who simply don’t care about such authenticity. When ex-president Michael Keating eventually weighs into the action, it takes the best part of half a page to describe his weapons and his kit, which includes a “level III high cut ballistic helmet, with an ATN PVS14 night vision device extended up into the air”. It’s quite a look.

Keating is a former Navy SEAL, as he tells us himself in the (always very brief) chapters told from his point of view. He’s a war hero, wounded in Afghanistan, who opts for even more peril by entering politics. By the end of Part One, however, he’s been ignominiously defeated at the end of his first term by the scheming vice-president, Pamela Barnes, brought down in part by his failed Libyan mission to assassinate the terrorist Asim Al-Asheed.

Two years later, Keating is licking his wounds in his large lake house somewhere near the Canadian border, keeping robustly fit by canoe-racing his Secret Service minder and chopping wood while reflecting on fellow POTUS brush cutters Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. All men of action, obviously.

His loving wife, Samantha, has gone back to academia and archaeology, it’s her time he tells us; and his 19-year-old daughter, Mel, is on a visit with her college boyfriend, Tim, and off for a hike. Which is when she is captured by the dastardly Al-Asheed and the action hots up once again as Keating decides to do the job of rescuing her himself (I can already see an ageing Bruce Willis in the battered hero role). For Keating, it’s very personal.

For Secretary of State Ellen Adams, it’s much more than personal. While her journalist son, her capable daughter and her best friend, Betsy Jameson, will all play a key role in the race to capture nuclear arms dealer Bashir Shah before he blows up any more buses in capital cities, the real threat lies much closer to home. Shah, it transpires, has been released from prison in Pakistan, largely at the behest of former president Eric Dunn, who now resides in his Italianate pseudo palace in Florida.