Former Vice President Joe Biden is down in the dumps.

While former President Barack Obama is traveling the world having adventures with celebrities, Biden is bored at home. To make matters worse, Biden hasn’t heard from Obama since they left the White House in early 2017.

Uncle Joe feels abandoned by Barack, the man he considered his best friend. And Biden is ticked.

The former president hasn’t even texted until a former acquaintance of Biden’s dies in a mysterious way. Then Obama and a Secret Service agent arrive at Biden’s house to let the former vice president know he may be in danger.

The scenario is not a tabloid story, or some form of fake news, but rather the framing for the funny mystery novel, “Hope Never Dies.”

Author Andrew Shaffer brands “Hope Never Dies” as “An Obama Biden Mystery.” And one can only hope this is only the first of a series of similar books.

Shaffer tells the story from Biden’s perspective. The narration sounds like Biden, sort of an earnest, grouchy, dad-joke vibe that makes for an enjoyable read.

The plot blends factual points from the lives of both men with fiction. For example, as a senator, Biden regularly rode an Amtrak train to work in Washington, D.C.; that’s fact. Biden’s train travel is a pivotal plot point since the acquaintance found dead on the tracks was the regular conductor from Biden’s train days. That’s fiction.

Maybe it’s the memes that pervaded social media during the last year of the Obama administration — the memes picturing Obama and Biden together accompanied by a joke line — but “Hope Never Dies” works.

Oddly, the more ridiculous the situation, the more believable the story becomes. It’s easy to imagine Obama and Biden disguised in ball caps, slipping away from a Secret Service agent, entering a motel room only to apologetically make an excuse to leave upon encountering a woman wearing only a towel.

Novelist James Patterson and former President Bill Clinton wrote a thriller about a fictional Commander in Chief titled “The President is Missing.” Released earlier this year, it was a thrilling read about the possibility of the United States being technologically crippled.

It was fun but “Hope Never Dies” may be more fun. Shaffer doesn’t parley with global terrorists and the fall of America. Instead, Obama and Biden deal with angry cops and bikers in what is more like an “Murder, She Wrote”-type mystery.

The stakes are low but the payoff for readers is high.