Zero Day by Jan Gangsei

Summary: Eight years ago Addie Webster was the victim of the most notorious kidnapping of the decade. She vanished-and her high-profile parents were forced to move on. Mark Webster is now president of the United States and fighting to keep the Oval Office after a tumultuous first term. Then the unthinkable happens: the president’s daughter resurfaces. Addie is brought back into the family fold, but who is this sixteen-year-old girl with a quiet, burning intelligence now living in the White House? There are those in the president’s political circle who find her timely return suspicious.When a national security advisor approaches Darrow Fergusson, Addie’s childhood best friend and the son of the president’s chief of staff, he doesn’t know what to think. How could the girl he’s missed for all these years be a threat to national security? Still, at the risk of having his own secrets exposed, Darrow agrees to spy on Addie and soon realizes that his old friend is much more than the traumatized victim of a sick political fringe group. Addie has come with a mission … but will she choose to complete it?

This breathless thriller grabbed me from the first chapter, and the heart-pounding pace doesn’t let up. Gangsei combines the multiple perspectives typical of the political thriller genre with an unerring focus on the two teen protagonists, Addie Webster, the First Daughter who has returned home after being abducted at age eight, and Darrow Fergusson, the best friend she left behind. Addie is at once smart and ruthless and relatable and vulnerable, and the details of both plot and setting make Gangsei’s knowledge of life inside the DC Beltway clear. Reader, prepare to be sucked in. You have been warned.

ZERO DAY is out now.

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