The Better Angels

It was poorly received at the time of its release; its premise of terrorists using passenger planes as instruments of destruction was considered too implausible to suspend one's disbelief.

It opens and closes with the Midsummer and Midwinter parties held by Patrick Graham, a news anchor famous for his progressive politics, and his wife, Charlotte, and in between those isolated chapters, it is divided into four parts.

The novel's inciting incident is when one-legged Clive Wilmot, an Englishman (England is out of money, and Eton-educated British often work as servants to wealthy Americans) arrives uninvited at the Grahams' Midsummer Party, telling Patrick that President Lockwood, who is supposedly liberal and a champion of the people, had Ibn Awad executed.

Patrick Graham goes to visit Horace Hubbard at his home in Beirut, and learns that Ibn Awad had dysgraphia from a lesion in his brain that rendered him unable to write, and presumed uneducatable and illiterate.

He is believed to have connections with a terrorist group called the Eye of Gaza that has been using suicide bombers in airplanes over Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Large cities are dark at night to conserve electricity, and garbage pickup has stopped, causing urban areas to become squalid and filthy.

Based on what he learns, when he finally broadcasts the story, he claims that Lockwood saved Jerusalem and New York by his action, although the nuclear bombs were never found.

At the novel's climax, Clive Wilmot is identified as the source of the nuclear bombs, although the fact that he is willing to sit on their cases indicates an unlikelihood that they ever existed in the first place.

Rose MacKenzie, lover of Horace Hubbard and a mathematician in charge of FIS computer systems, reveals that she is able to steal the election.

With the passcodes "a sunlit upland" in a speech made by Lockwood on the abandoned Washington Mall after terrorist attacks at speeches in landmark locations, and "pastrami, hold the mayonnaise," Rose gets a certain number of votes in places where computerized voting is set up (only in California, New York, and Michigan) for Mallory and gives them to Lockwood, causing him to win the election by a very close margin.