It's a good bet that George W. Bush won't be taking a break from the campaign to read Larry Beinhart's latest political thriller The Librarian.

Some people might claim the president would be hard-pressed to get through a book that doesn't have pictures in it, and those folks will enjoy this clearly left-leaning tale of intrigue and gamesmanship on the presidential trail.

Beinhart, the Edgar Award-winning author of American Hero, which became the film Wag the Dog, will come across as annoying or a genius to readers who pick up The Librarian, fiction that doesn't stray far from today's political landscape.

A gifted writer who knows how to keep a plot moving, Beinhart could be compared with masterly thrill-spinners such as Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen, although his work is much more grounded in liberal ideology. And although conservatives might not be able to get around the book's clear bias, those who do will be rewarded with a fantastical satire on the hypocrisy of the modern political process, on both sides.

The central figure is David Goldberg, a struggling-to-survive college librarian who lands a side job cataloging files for a prominent real estate magnate in suburban Washington, D.C. As he delves into his boss's files, Goldberg becomes entwined in a secret Republican plot to undermine the campaign of the Democratic challenger on the eve of the election, thus ensuring their man will get a second term in the White House.

The name of this Republican incumbent is Augustus Scott, but that's about all that separates him from Bush, or at least Bush as envisioned by his liberal opponents. Scott is the progeny of a privileged East Coast family who plays the middle-class heartstrings of the Midwest by emphasizing God and family values and by bashing the elitist attitudes and mores of people with backgrounds most like his.

It's no accident that Beinhart chose the name Augustus for his version of George Bush, as he clearly views the president as bent on building an empire for the rich. In describing Scott's record of eroding environmental protections and enhancing tax breaks for the wealthy, Beinhart shows how the president's constant emphasis on patriotism and military strength keep attention away from the fact that the deficit is ballooning and the country's economic future is being mortgaged.

When Goldberg's boss and his Republican cronies realize the librarian might have stumbled onto their top-secret plot to manipulate the election, they decide he must be killed. What follows are plot points that demand a significant suspension of disbelief by readers, but which allow Beinhart to offer his cynical take on the machinations of politics.

While Scott seems to be a Bush clone, his opponent is markedly different from 2004's actual Democratic candidate, John Kerry. Scott's challenger is a woman named Anne Lynn Murphy, a senator from Idaho who struggles to balance the harsh realities of political necessity with her ideals of public service.

But like Kerry, she is a veteran of the Vietnam War, and this gives Beinhart a platform to launch withering criticisms of the Bush administration.

In a debate a week before the election, Murphy responds to criticism about her record in Vietnam by turning the focus on Scott, who, like Bush, was able to avoid being sent to combat by enlisting in the National Guard. She zeroes in on the myth that her opponent is a tough, brave leader:

"My opponent wants you to think he's some sort of war hero,"she says. "He keeps staging these video events of himself . . . eating chow with our real fighting men and women. I think it shows a certain contempt for all of us, that he thinks we're so stupid that we'll see him on TV and think that he actually goes out and fights. . . . But the truth is that he was a coward during Vietnam . . ."

Ouch. For liberals, such passages are meant to be a call to arms around the Democratic flag. For conservatives, they're off-putting, to say the least.

So, one can expect The Librarian to sell well in the blue states, poorly in the red ones.

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