It's some time in between the end of the Obama administration and the present; Biden is getting used to life as a private citizen again and moping a bit about the fact that Barack doesn't call when he finds out that an Amtrak conductor he knows from way back is dead, struck by a train, with heroin in his pocket. Biden doesn't believe the drug angle, and so he sets out to find out what happened, with a little help from the Sherlock to his Watson.
I knew I had to read this book when the Kirkus review compared it to My Fellow Americans, my favorite movie that hardly anybody has heard of, where James Garner and Jack Lemmon play ex-presidents from opposing parties who team up to get to the bottom of a scandal in the current administration. While this was a clever, entertaining read, it didn't quite rise to that level of buddy comedy for me. Maybe it's because of the point of view: first person Biden. There are moments that achieve the silliness of the Obama/Biden memes from the last months of the administration, or the "Onion Joe" parody representations of the former VP, but the thing is that fictional!Biden isn't ridiculous in his own head, and that's where we mostly are. We see the comedy most clearly when we see the flaws in, for example, his idea of brilliant disguises reflected in Obama's eyes, although there are some action sequences that are so indisputably comic that they need no straight man as interpreter. In his head, Biden is lonely for his closest friend for eight years and wandering if he's all washed-up, and while no buddy comedy is complete without some self reflection, it shouldn't carry the story. The result was a decent two hundred-ish pages of entertainment, but not nearly as laugh out loud funny as one would hope.
Overall: B-