State of Terror chronicles the heroic adventures of Ellen Adams, an international media tycoon who is inexplicably nominated to serve as U.S. secretary of state by one of her fiercest political rivals, President Douglas Williams, after working tirelessly to defeat him in the Democratic primary. She is already stressed out after a few weeks on the job, and just can’t wait to “remove the Spanx and pour a large glass of Chardonnay.” She obsesses over petty personal politics, and is constantly judging other women by their looks, even as the clock ticks down to nuclear armageddon.

Adams isn’t the only character with an instantly recognizable real-life counterpart. There’s the perpetually disheveled British prime minister, described as a “hollow man, an upper-class twit, with any guts he might have had replaced by entitlement and random Latin phrases.” One of the chief villains turns out to be Russian president Maxim Ivanov, a short-statured thug who simply can’t stand the thought of a powerful woman having it all. Ivanov, of course, is a chief ally of former president Eric Dunn, aka “Eric the Dumb,” the racist tyrant currently sulking at his Palm Beach estate after failing to collude successfully to steal another election. His breath “smelled of meat.”

The world is already a mess thanks to Dunn’s raging incompetence and corruption, and it’s about to get a lot messier.