Hillary Clinton, patron saint of overachievers, has a new sideline: writing thrillers. Her first effort, State of Terror, is coauthored with best-selling mystery writer Louise Penny. The novel is the kind of book you’d buy in the airport to read on a plane, except, while I haven’t been in that situation in a while, my recollection is that even airports sell better books than this.

It’s possible to write good thrillers with bad politics. During the Cold War, most novels in the genre had the kind of anti-communist conservative politics we at Jacobin would consider “bad,” but some of them were still fun beach reads. (Although the best thrillers to date are those in the Millennium series [The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo] by the late Stieg Larsson, a Swedish Trotskyite feminist journalist who once trained women guerrilla fighters in the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front.) Clinton and Penny’s novel is not of this ilk. The problem is, State of Terror is not thrilling, for the same reason that the Clintonite Democrats are not exciting the electorate right now: they’re too obsessed with Donald Trump and the Right.

There are some spoilers in the review that follows. This doesn’t matter because — and I can’t emphasize this enough — you don’t need to read this book.