Double Down, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, review Fortunately, we're soon hitting the election trail, hot on the heels of the various presidential hopefuls. As with their previous book, the story is divided in two, with the first 300 pages primarily devoted to the Republican nomination fight, and the rest to the election proper. This introduces us to a wild and wacky cast of candidates: pizza magnate Herman Cain, who devised a new nine per cent tax rate plan: "Nobody's gonna remember 8.7... we're rounding it up"; Michele Bachmann, who had a nervous breakdown after spotting one of her rivals sitting in on one of her speeches; and Donald Trump, who turned down the opportunity to stand for president because a new series of The Apprentice was about to start filming. This is the stage of the election cycle Halperin and Heilemann enjoy covering most. There's a lot of wheeling and dealing going on, and plenty of people happy to spill the beans. One group that don't get much of a look-in are the 130 million Americans who got to vote in the contest, and whose jobs and livelihoods depended on the outcome. If you wanted to be critical of Double Down, you could argue that it fails to place the campaign in any broader historical or socio-political context. As soon as you open the book you find yourself firmly within the campaign bubble, and you don't reappear until election night. But you know what you're getting with this type of fly-on-the-wall narrative, and I for one love it. Where Halperin and Heilemann excel is in the second half of the story, as they shift their focus to the struggle between Obama and Romney.This could have been tough-going, given that by this stage the fundamentals of the campaign were set. Romney had won the nomination, but had been defined in the process as a robotic, featureless tactician, whose only hope was to persuade people he would be a better economic manager than his opponent. Obama, by contrast, was bloodied by four years in office, but had the organisation, funding and political experience necessary to deliver one last successful campaign. As a result, the outcome of the election was never really in doubt, but the authors manage to keep the tension - both human and political - alive right until the final page. Many people were asking whether Halperin and Heilemann could furnish a book as memorable as Race of a Lifetime. Double Down is their answer: yes, they can. Double Down by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann