Although President Bill Clinton's healthcare plans were blocked and his Middle East peace initiative failed, his eight years in the White House had an enduring influence on mystery fiction.
His habit of carrying a thriller in photo-range when boarding Air Force One or Marine One raised the sales of authors including Walter Mosley, PD James and Richard North Patterson. And the scandals that shadowed the Clinton presidency – both financial (Whitewater) and sexual (Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky) – also liberated political novelists to darken their tone, starting with David Baldacci's Absolute Power in 1996, in which the president is a rapist-murderer.
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