Now that the Memorial Day weekend is practically here, we’re catching up on lighter, Washington-themed reading. Today, it’s “Blood Oath: The President’s Vampire” by Christopher Farnsworth, out now from Putnam.
The premise: In 1867, President Andrew Johnson commutes the death sentence of a sailor who killed his fellow crewmembers and drank their blood. Johnson realizes the sailor is, in fact, a vampire. Johnson and his successors each find their own way of interacting with the vampire, Nathaniel Cade, using him to protect the U.S.
In the years after 9/11, the U.S. has elected a president who’s “an overgrown frat boy with a mile-wide mean streak.” That president (unnamed in the book) has left the country with “two wars in the Middle East and an economy that resembled a bounced check” and after a campaign in which his fictional successor, Samuel Curtis, “had been compared to the Antichrist.”