Book Review: Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery, by Andrew Shaffer (2018)

The awesome cover of Hope Never Dies, by  Andrew Shaffer, 2018. Sadly, Joe Biden doesn't drive a t-top 1977 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am in the novel.

Author Andrew Shaffer.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden, best buddies.

Are you sick and tired of the current political situation in the United States? Are you nostalgic for the time when Barack Obama was President, Joe Biden was Vice President, and they would go out for ice cream together? If you answered yes to both those questions, I have the perfect book for you: Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery, by Andrew Shaffer. 

In Hope Never Dies, Joe Biden is adjusting to life as a former Vice President when suddenly a longtime Amtrak conductor turns up dead on the railroad tracks. Uncle Joe starts poking around, and eventually gets his friend, former President Barack Obama, involved as well. 

As they did in real life, the fictional Biden and Obama make a good team—Barack is cool and cerebral, Joe is relaxed and shoots from the hip, following his gut. Shaffer writes the book in first person, from Biden’s point of view, and he does a good job at capturing Biden’s stream of consciousness thoughts. As Biden confides to us: “I had something of a reputation for being loose-lipped.” (p.74) 

The plot doesn’t really matter, as it’s all an excuse for us to enjoy seeing Obama and Biden together again, even if it’s only in fictional form. One highlight is Biden waxing poetic about getting to fire up his 2017 Dodge Challenger, with Obama in the passenger’s seat. 

Shaffer has a difficult needle to thread in Hope Never Dies. Should the book feel real, or should it be insanely over the top? Shaffer largely goes for realism, which I think is the better choice. (Although the novel does feature a dream sequence in which Obama is riding a unicorn.) 

Two critiques I have about the book: there are way too many “Joe is a really old guy!” jokes. We know, the guy turned 76 the year Hope Never Dies was released. But he didn’t step in from 1973 on a time-traveling Amtrak train, for crying out loud. (Okay, that sounds like a great idea for a novel: time-traveling Joe Biden! Hoping that the next leap will be the leap home.) He knows that people take selfies! He knows people other than sailors have tattoos! 

My second critique is that there’s just too much material about Biden feeling mopey that Obama hasn’t been hanging out with him enough. It’s just a standard buddy-film trope that gets too much ink here. Hopefully the second Obama Biden Mystery, 2019’s Hope Rides Again, remedies this and just has Barack and Joe being best buds from page one. Because honestly, that’s what we all want. We don’t want Joe moping around about his feelings; we want happy Joe and Barack going out for ice cream.