The Exception

For six hundred years, we've argued about Richard III. Was he a monster or a maligned King? The question was never really about him. It was about us.

In 1485, two men sit in a London tavern debating whether a King can set aside the rules for the greater good — and who decides when those times have come.

In 2025, the same argument plays out across America. Not in taverns, but in living rooms, courtrooms, newsrooms, and the halls of power. The rules are being rewritten. The question is whether anyone will stop it — and whether stopping it is even the right thing to do.

The Exception tells the story of one extraordinary year through the people living through it.

Kyle Rennick walks out of prison on Inauguration Day, pardoned for January 6th, expecting triumph. Instead he finds an empty parking lot, a family shattered by his choices, and a movement that wants him as a symbol but not as a person. His brother Tyler, who testified against him, is in hiding. Their mother is caught between them.

A woman reads a children's book in a government waiting room while her husband — a man with a court order saying he can't be deported — is on a plane to the other side of the world. A federal agent carries out orders he's not sure are legal. A judge issues a ruling and watches the government ignore it. A journalist chases a story that keeps getting bigger and more dangerous. A congresswoman tries to hold a line that keeps moving. A bureaucrat discovers what happens when you say no. A voter realizes that the country she thought she lived in may not exist anymore. A Supreme Court justice faces the case of a lifetime.

Each chapter follows a different person. Each person sees the same events from a different angle. None of them are villains. None of them are saints. All of them believe they're right.

Richard Warburg has written a novel that does something rare in political fiction — it takes both sides seriously. The administration's defenders are not fools. The opposition's critics are not saints. The parallels to Shakespeare's Richard III are deliberate, but the conclusions are yours to draw.

This is not a book about left or right. It's a book about what happens when a nation decides that the situation requires exceptions — and what those exceptions cost the ordinary people who have to live with them.

The Exception is the fifth book in the Red White and Blue Land series. But each book stands completely alone and can be read in any order.