The President's Daughter: A Thriller

In The President’s Daughter, a father’s personal duty to his family repeatedly conflicts with his professional duty to the state that elected him as its vice president. The novel suggests that for powerful leaders, the personal and political spheres are permanently entangled, compelling difficult choices that pit one set of duties against another. When the daughter of Matthew Keating, former president of the US, is kidnapped as retribution for a presidential order, his public past directly fuels his private crisis, demonstrating that the responsibilities of power extend far beyond a term in office.

The central conflict is born from the convergence of Keating’s former political power and his present personal duty. The kidnapper, Asim Al-Asheed, is motivated by a desire for revenge for a US military raid that Keating authorized, which resulted in the death of Al-Asheed’s family. Al-Asheed’s deeply personal vendetta arises from a political decision, forcing Keating to confront the consequences of his presidency not as a statesman but as a father. His response is necessarily personal. Stripped of institutional authority, he operates outside the law, relying on his Navy SEAL training to pursue a rescue mission that the state is ill-equipped to handle.