It's a classic story of good against bad, David against Goliath, Republicans vs. Democrats.
And it's written by Marilyn Quayle, wife of Vice President Dan Quayle, and her sister, Nancy Northcott.So guess who are the good guys and who are the bad.
"Obviously" the sisters' politics figured heavily in the outline of the book, Quayle said. "You've got the Republican senator who's the good guy and you've got the Democrats that are bad, and communism is still bad."
In their thriller, "Embrace the Serpent," to be published April 3, the president is an Ivy League Democrat, obsessed by style over substance, and unwilling until nearly the end to believe that the Russians are plotting with Arab extremists to take over Cuba after Castro's death.
The book describes this Democratic president and the Democrat-controlled Congress as having "little understanding of either defense or security."
The authors lament: "If only they could understand the long-term implications of their actions and vote accordingly. If only the SDI were in place now and in its entirety," they said in reference to the anti-missile Strategic Defense Initiative.
It takes a Republican senator - a black from Georgia whose wife is a pediatrician and whose dog is named Justice - to dig up the evidence to persuade the president the Russians are up to no good, to support a Cuban patriot as the new Cuban leader and thwart a threat to the United States.
Quayle and Northcott depict the U.S. intelligence capabilities as inept. They write: "Rumors of Castro's death had reached the United States, but American intelligence agencies had been so crippled by the micromanagement of Congress that little concrete information was available."
Yes, more politics, Quayle said, but also a warning that "if we as a nation don't keep our intelligence capabilities open, we can be manipulated."
The media, which generally have not been favorable to Quayle the vice president, also take a big hit. The executive editor of the largest paper in Washington, D.C., the fictitious Washington Herald, is clearly biased, haughty and arrogant. And he's sleeping with an important senator's wife to boot.
But don't look for any graphic sex scenes.
"It didn't need it," Quayle said.
"Our brother told us that Louis L'Amour has sold millions of books and he never had a sex scene in any of his books," she said. "So we figured if it worked for Louis, it would work for us."
The women maintain that they didn't use any inside information for the book. "It's stuff that anyone, if they take the time, just like (espionage novelist) Tom Clancy has done in all his books," can find, Northcott said.
One tidbit they had fun with is in the second paragraph of the book, where Castro is described lighting "a physician-prohibited cigar he allowed himself only at meetings" of top Cuban officials. But Castro quit smoking in 1985.
"He supposedly stopped, but we decided he sneaks," Quayle said. "To all appearances he had quit . . . another failure of our espionage system."