Murder in the White House (Capital Crimes (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: Truman Makes Some Rookie Mistakes
Review: "Murder in the White House" is the first in the otherwise good 'Murder in Washington' series. Truman hasn't yet shown her best chops. Relying mostly on her personal recollections of White House, she crafts a reasonably good story, albeit with a predictable solution. Most readers will have guessed the President's big 'secret' fifty pages before the protagonists do. The inside scoop on White House is, not surprisingly, the strongest element. The rest is sodden and a bit weak. Truman shows no knowledge at all of the State Dept, guessing that the Secretary of State has a receptionist and a telephone log, as though the Department is run like a high school principal's office. Other agency heads, the Director of the FBI, CIA, etc. seem to be go-fers. Even our hero Ron, the President's Special Counsel, fails to spark much interest. He seems to be an okay guy, but is flat and undeveloped as a character. Truman didn't do her homework for this book, and she hasn't yet developed as a solid writer - either for plot or characterization. As a first effort in a series that gets much stronger over the years, Murder in the White House is not too bad.

Rating:
Summary: baltazar rosiles review
Review: (...) Margaret Truman's book, Murder in the White House, merits three stars because this book gets the attention of the reader with great and pretty details, keeping the book interesting and emotionally. This book is about looking the responsible of the murder in the white house; in the way the book shows all the relations or romance that Blaine had before he pass away, and also the cost that Ron Fairbanks had to find the true of this accident. This incident provides dark pass of Blaine's life, Ron's consequences, the bribes to cancel the agreements, and secretes of the president's family. (...)Also, we will learn to say always the true to prevent consequences. I really recommend this novel to everybody who wants to increase their knowledge of the problems that happen to the biggest people of the society. I really learned a lot of this novel because I always thought that the biggest people do not suffer and we can see during this novel that everybody is human and everybody can make mistakes and feel the consequences of the mistakes

Rating:
Summary: Moderately entertaining
Review: The first book in Margaret Truman's Capital Crimes series is moderately entertaining, but no more. The Secretary of State is killed in the White House; the President appoints his inexperienced Junior Counsel to head up the investigation. There's a lot of talk, an action sequence, some more talk, another murder, some more talk, and then it all ends rather hurriedly.

The book's main strength is the way it hints that bigger, darker things are at stake. But it has no real sense of urgency or structure. For example: couldn't the investigators have made a list of all people who had access to the relevant part of the White House at the relevant time, and worked through them one by one? Instead, they seem to be poking around at random. You can never tell whether or not they're really making progress. Another example: the hero didn't vote for the President, has no investigative experience, and yet is put in charge of the investigation. This could be a fascinating hook to explore the President's mixed motivations and the hero's ambition, but it too goes nowhere. The characterization throughout is fairly flat, with only the central puzzle holding the reader's attention.

Oh, and... I guessed the murderer, and more or less the motive. Fun, and somewhat atmospheric just by virtue of its setting, but by no means great.

Rating:
Summary: Serious logical flaws hamper the story
Review: The premise of the book is an interesting one, the secretary of state is found professionally murdered in the White House and the circle of suspects includes the president. However, there are some substantial flaws in the book that seriously reduce the quality of the story. The major one is that the murdered secretary of state is found to have taken bribes and frequented prostitutes. Given that the timeframe is set after the Carter presidency, the premise that no one knew before his death is simply beyond belief. In the post Watergate environment, such misbehavior would have been like a wounded fish to a hungry shark of journalists.
Another major problem is that the secret service agents assigned to guard the president's daughter deliberately allow her to be placed in a dangerous situation. This is implausible, and making the most professional of officers into bumbling incompetents rarely makes a story stronger.
While the original murderer is not the one you may think, there is another murder committed as a cover up and the perpetrator of that crime is rather clear. I enjoyed the book, but found the weaknesses greater than the quality of the tale.